Quote:
Originally posted by Eternium
I strongly dislike the methodology. "Stairway to Heaven" can't chart despite having well over 3,000,000 plays on radio.
It's still telling to see how well an artist charts, but it's not as important as their overall sales/plays/streams, imo.
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I think it's much closer to approximating climate-independent success than raw sales are.
For instance, The Sound of Music was by far one of the biggest musical releases of all time in nearly every single country in the world that has charts dating back to the 1960s. In the UK, it was the best-charting and best-selling album of 1965, 1966, and 1968 (and #2 best-selling album in 1967). In the US, it was one of the two best-selling and best-charting albums of 1965, 1966, and 1967. In raw sales, it would not appear on a list of the top 250 albums in the US or of the Top 50 albums in the UK because the album sales climate in the 1960s was so poor. Luckily, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band avoided the same fate by way of incredible catalog sales during more lucrative eras.
The album sales chart, in my opinion, already takes "overall" success into account quite well. Notably low positioning for a few select group of incredibly successful albums, such as Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, AC/DC's Back In Black, Eagles' Greatest Hits, and Led Zeppelin's Led Zeppelin IV isn't really due as much to the methodology as it is to the fact that I have incomplete data for the albums charts of the 1970s.
As far as your point about Stairway To Heaven goes, well of course, but that's a consequence of the rules of the Hot 100, not the methodology of this ranking. At the end of the day, there are other charts for sales, plays, and streams, but I definitely don't believe unadjusted numbers are going to provide a better picture of data across different climates.
Interestingly, one measure of the sustained success of past artists is recurrent airplay. In a Mediabase tracking period from 1991-2008 (which is unfortunately the last date data was reported), the most played recurrent artists by decade were:
1960s
1. The Beatles
2. The Rolling Stones
3. Supremes
1970s
1. Elton John
2. Eagles
3. Led Zeppelin
1980s
1. Madonna
2. Phil Collins
3. Michael Jackson (I have a feeling he'd be even higher if he had posthumous numbers)
1990s
1. Shania Twain
2. Garth Brooks
3. Tim McGraw
2000s
1. Usher
2. Nelly
3. Toby Keith
And the most played artists of the past 10 years by raw spins:
1. Taylor Swift
2. Rihanna
3. Katy Perry
In my lists, all of these artists hold a position in the Top 5 among artists from that decade on either the Hot 100 chart, Billboard 200 chart, or both, and in most cases, in the same order of their airplay. In that sense, I actually think it shows a high degree of correlation between chart success and long-term or other forms of non-chart success.
I suspect climate-adjusted assessments done with raw sales numbers would yield similar results, and if I can ever get my hands on the data, I'd love to do that too.
no damn mercy
