In a recent post by RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), and covered by Conceivably Tech, it’s no surprise that digital music downloads is becoming the mainstream, and album sales is no longer the best metric for measuring an artist’s success. For example, “according to the RIAA, I Gotta Feeling has been certified as “6x Platinum”, which means that the single has been downloaded more than six million times,” making it the best selling digital single in history.
Might we suggest a new metric for us storage buffs…the byte metric.
6,000,000 downloads at an average of say 3MB means that I Gotta Feeling’s byte metric is 18,000,000,000MB (Megabytes) or 18,000 GB (Gigabytes), 18TB (Terabytes). Assuming the platinum count starts at 1 million, we’ll start the byte metric at 1TB.
- 1TB = 333,000 downloads
- 2TB = 666,000 downloads
- 3TB = 999,000 downloads
- etc.
Of course this does not take into effect those that love raw format audio, but let’s focus on the masses for now.
So what would be the top 10 best selling digital singles be on this new byte metric?
1. Black Eyed Pees – I Gotta Feeling (18TB)
2. Flo Rida featuring T-Pain – Low 5,640,000 (17TB)
3. Lady Gaga featuring Colby O’Donis – Just Dance (16TB)
4. The Black Eyed Peas – Boom Boom Pow (16TB)
5. Lady Gaga – Poker Face (16TB)
6. Jason Mraz – I’m Yours (15TB)
7. Ke$ha – Tik Tok (15TB)
8. Timbaland featuring OneRepublic – Apologize (14TB)
9. Taylor Swift – Love Story (13TB)
10. Flo Rida – Right Round (13TB)
source: Yahoo Chart Watch Extra: Top 20 Songs in Digital History as of August 6, 2010.
Just a thought…
Taking into account differences in recording quality and song length, a byte metric makes no sense at all. Funny, but not useful.