Posted May 27, 20223 yr So the mountain looks like it is about to be finally climbed Elvis Presley currently has 1307 weeks in the Top 75, Ed Sheeran has 1288. Therefore, I guess with at least three tracks in every weeks, we’re looking at a couple of months at most!
May 28, 20223 yr Now he just needs to surpass Elvis' talent, and it won't be in this reincarnation obviously.
May 28, 20223 yr I'm assuming Ed is already the biggest selling UK artist of all time in the UK. Is Shape of you the biggest selling single ever yet too?
May 28, 20223 yr SoY has the highest official chart sales yes (5.5m). I assume he’d be the biggest act overall (though not on pure sales obviously).
May 28, 20223 yr Now he just needs to surpass Elvis' talent, and it won't be in this reincarnation obviously. He's a better songwriter :lol:
May 28, 20223 yr Yeah but no but streaming is not sales. Had streaming been a thing beatles wouldve pooped over all records even with the 3 track rule. Basically 3tracks every week for 8 years and then extras in 73 76 throughoutvthe 80s 1996 and then again with downloadsand streaming. Same with elvis. Elvis records and movies were everywhere for 15 years. Making arbitrary decisions about wha constitutes a sale ie repeat plays pull a figure out of the air but not oldies which are a different figure for chart purposes is comparing oranges with cabbages :teresa:
May 28, 20223 yr He's a better songwriter :lol: Hmmmm.... It really pains me he's now level with Madonna for UK #1s (although not quite as much as it pains me Wasteoflife have one more than her)
May 28, 20223 yr What about Cliff Richard? Thought he had more weeks in the charts than Elvis? and what about Drake? His chart presence has dropped a bit but he was always in the charts 3-10 years ago
May 28, 20223 yr While I prefer more Ed songs to elvis, streaming in a way has tainted chart legacys.Its easier now to build up weeks on charts than it was for artists before streaming era. I totally understand its the way it is now but I realky feel its not comparable. Its like A million selling single back in the day was just a huge achievement but its not the case anymore, is 3 million these days a fair comparison to a million seller back then? A huge million selling number 1 probably achieved around 20 weeks in the charts back then, intodays charts I'm not sure how many weeks would be comparable.
May 28, 20223 yr Aside from the reasons already mentioned, Elvis was already dead by the time the chart expanded to a Top 75. A fairer comparison would be Top 20 weeks if anyone has that (since the Top 40 was only introduced in 1960), where Elvis is still a long way ahead. Even in Top 40 weeks, Elvis is on 1062 vs. 778 for Ed, and in Top 10 weeks it's 386 vs. 280.
May 28, 20223 yr Now he just needs to surpass Elvis' talent, and it won't be in this reincarnation obviously. Elvis didn't even write his songs. :coffee:
May 30, 20223 yr It's an old and never-to-be-resolved problem, and debate continues on many fora as to the rights and wrongs of it. But on the sheer basis of logic and reasonableness, let us be clear on this: presenting combined sales and 'sales-equivalent' unit tallies is flawed, and given the differences in the two modes of consumption, is essentially meaningless in statistical terms, regardless of how much a of a stamp of 'officialness' is put on them because they are presented to us via the Official Charts Company. Seeking to compare the relative abilities and talents of Elvis Presley and Ed Sheeran on an objective musical, lyrical or performance basis is a tricky task that may well result in no easy singular conclusion. But it's still a more worthwhile exercise than trying to compare the relative value of an online rented stream of a recording to a paid-for purchase of it as a physical or digital product! There really is no meaningful level playing field possible when trying to tally both true sales and notional ones through streams; providing consolidated totals of both for a track makes no sense other than to serve the apparent need to simplify and smooth out the process of transiting from one form of consumption to the other over time, for the purposes of weekly chart compilation, and providing a false narrative of continuity in our history of 'best-sellers' by citing total consumption figures to the public, which would be more awkward to report if the two discrete measures, of sales and streams, were to be cited in every case. Albeit that we all must tolerate the reality that buying music is now largely a niche activity of a diminishing minority, while streaming it is the preferred medium for an increasing majority, they are two entirely separate ways of consuming such product, and it can hardly be a fair process to simply add together notional 'sales-equivalent' units derived from streaming figures from 2014 onwards to the number of actual purchases, using an arbitrary conversion ratio based on simplistic mathematical convenience (100:1), where acts that released tracks before (and which had their commercial peaks prior to) the advent of streaming as an alternative method of consumption will by and large eventually always lose out, as once-impressive sales tallies readily get eclipsed by 'sales-equivalent' counts in a short period of time. This inevitably skews the surface performance of songs as at face value these figures suggest that more recent streaming-heavy but sales-light tracks are essentially more 'successful' commercially than those which were sales-heavy, but have been streaming-light. Arguably it should if anything be the other way around, if we assume a paid-for sale of a single song as a discrete product (whether it be a £2.99 CD or 99p digital download) and that can then be listened to indefinitely at the purchaser's leisure, must surely carry more gravitas than numerous repeated listens to it paid for either by a £15 monthly umbrella subscription or 'free' via advertising subsidy. The investment in that particular product in its own right for personal ownership is seemingly greater than if one rents listens of it off a digital platform. It seems perfectly correct to assume that had streaming been available in the time of Elvis, The Beatles, Cliff and all other acts whose traditional sales performances were strong prior to the 2010s, would have accrued far larger overall tallies had listens been measurable and added alongside buys. We can never know by what margins of course, but given their widespread cross-society appeal and musical/cultural impact as reflected through en-masse sales, it's safe to say that they would likely have outshone the likes of Ed et al for some time to come, especially as acts who've only scored hits in the streaming-driven era, unlike their sales-led forebears, have accrued so few overall sales to add into their mix. It simply isn't acceptable to say a song that's accrued over 1,000,000 sales-equivalent units is a 'million-seller' and while it is a worthy achievement by current norms, it should be categorised separately from the true million-selling list, which now is essentially frozen in time, with only the odd move every now and then as digital sales trickle to frictional levels. In fairness, even the Official Charts Company do still seem to recognise this key distinction and once in a while will present a table of only those releases which have sold one million copies or more either in-store or by click, entirely without any additional notional numbers disingenuously wrung out from streams. Conversely, it is probably true to say that had streaming not been invented (or not taken off as the preferred means of consuming music in the way it has), digital sales in particular would've continued to be strong as they were ten years ago, and some of the most popular titles we've seen in the last few years would doubtless have gone on to shift large numbers of paid-for copies in the absence of an appealing streaming model; the likes of 'Shape Of You', 'Despacito', 'Blinding Lights' and so on would likely now be in the hallowed hall of seven-figure sales hits if buying them had been the only means of accessing them. History did not play out that way. But to begin falsely totting up numbers derived from such discrete measures of consumption doesn't solve the problem and will only present an increasingly unfair and warped account of what our most 'popular' songs through time have been, based on apparent commercial appeal. Popchartfreak puts it far more concisely in their post above - it's like trying to "compare oranges with cabbages"! Edited May 30, 20223 yr by Gambo
May 30, 20223 yr You cannot fairly compare like for like. Streaming has thrown a huge spanner into the all-time record books.
May 30, 20223 yr A lot of the comments are rightly saying you can’t compare sales with streams when looking at all time records, but you can still compare weeks on the chart relatively fairly. Even though streaming makes chart runs longer the ACR system somewhat redresses that balance. However as Jim said Elvis didn’t have the benefit of a full Top 75.
May 31, 20223 yr This is rubbish. It's a total movement of the goalposts. It's like saying to athletes who ran the 100m before 2005 that their times are now obsolete because from 2005 athletes could now race the 100m on motorbikes. The analogy is a little off, but you get my point. In the download and streaming era, new artists had huge advantages that older artists didn't have. For a time, we had the ridiculous situation, where the idiotic OCC allowed all album tracks to chart - thus canceling out decades of great chart achievements. Imagine if Madonna or Elvis or indeed the Beatles had been allowed to have their album tracks to chart (even 3 of them). I feel the OCC has destroyed our charts, their value, and that they make the rules up as they go. This achievement is therefore worthless for me - it's like comparing chalk with cheese. The chart and chart records are devalued. I may also be bitter because I will likely never own or play an Ed Sheeran song - I absolutely despise this kind of mediocrity :-)
May 31, 20223 yr Yeah but no but streaming is not sales. Had streaming been a thing beatles wouldve pooped over all records even with the 3 track rule. Basically 3tracks every week for 8 years and then extras in 73 76 throughoutvthe 80s 1996 and then again with downloadsand streaming. Same with elvis. Elvis records and movies were everywhere for 15 years. Making arbitrary decisions about wha constitutes a sale ie repeat plays pull a figure out of the air but not oldies which are a different figure for chart purposes is comparing oranges with cabbages :teresa: Yeah I saw a tweet the other day saying if streams can be “converted” into sales, then sales should be translated into streams - a trillion streams for Thriller then :P Streaming has really sucked the fun out of pop and chart following
May 31, 20223 yr To be fair, the OCC publish a separate Sales only chart, and separate charts again for Physicals, Downloads, Audio Streaming, Video, etc. so if combining one unit of measurement with another feels like too much, you can peruse these instead. Clearly there are other things which have changed over time such as length of availability which mean that a like-for-like comparison with the charts of 20+ years ago is still unachievable, but as long as one is aware of the limitations, these kind of comparisons should be harmless. For example, Blinding Lights has just reached the unprecedented mark of 130 consecutive weeks on the Sales chart, although that's probably something Frank Sinatra's My Way would have already done had the chart been a Top 100 in the early 1970s. As far as which chart is given the 'official' tag, while I can see a valid argument for the album chart reverting to sales only, I'm afraid you won't convince me that Saint PHNX - Make Us Dream (#3 on singles sales last week) is more aligned to the public's taste than Cat Burns - Go. The main thing I think the OCC really got wrong is the 100:1 ratio for all-time streams to sales conversion, making it far too easy to reach 1 million combined sales. In July 2017 they set the ACR ratio to 300:1 for weekly chart purposes, and that would have made sense in the grander scale too, but a couple of months later they launched the 'millionaires' list at 100:1 and the horse then bolted.
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