Quote:
Originally posted by brianc33616
That was 13 months before I was on here (I wish I had known about this website before last April), but the Hot 100 was getting hundreds, maybe thousands of angry comments every week demanding "Thrift Shop" be put back where it belonged at #1. No one was taking Baauer's side.
Paul Grein echoed the sentiment in his Chart Watch column, considering TS had a 27,000 point lead over #2 the week before at #1 and made another week of huge across the board gains the week "Harlem Shake" debuted on top of TS and pushed it down to #2. At least TS won out in the year end chart.
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I mean at the time I also thought it was a bit ridiculous, and back then the way in which they calculated and weighted the streams on youtube (for it to debut with 100M+ streams and score, I believe, quadruple the chart points of Thrift Shop) was just ridiculous.
* Just an aside, that was how it earned such a high Year-End position, because at its peak on the Hot 100, every week it spent at #1 was equivalent to 3-4 weeks of points for the average #1. So what we saw was Harlem Shake amass the points of a ~10-12 week #1 in just 5 weeks. I mean that's pretty obvious to us chart-watchers, but just typing it out like this makes it sound so insane 
But looking back now, I'm kind of glad it happened. Yes, Thrift Shop was definitely robbed of those weeks. But it's not like they mean anything now. It would have just taken Thrift Shop from a 6 week #1 to an 11 week #1, which isn't too big of a deal. From sales and other metrics you can tell it was massive.
Harlem shake was just such a phenomena at the time, that I think it deserved to be recognised in the way it was. It's really hard to remember what it was like, but the damn tune was everywhere and everybody was trying to make them. Let's not forget, we were coming off of the back of Gangnam Style, a song which had also been blatantly robbed due to the lack of video streaming counting. I just find it funny how I used to get so annoyed over Harlem Shake going #1, but nowadays I'm actually happy that it did. Though in saying that, it did not deserve such a high year-end position.
