Best-selling vs. Best

This week another chart/list is published.  Television music channel VH1 has compiled a list of the  ‘Best-sold UK Albums of All Time’.   Compiling such lists seems to have become a major preoccupation with the music press over the last couple of years – something I can only attribute to lazy journalism (and the main reason I cancelled my subscription to Q after 10 years).  VH1 claims their new list has more credibility than most because it is compiled purely from actual sales figures for the past 50-some years.

The full chart runs to 100 albums, but for brevity, the top 10 are:

1. Queen Greatest Hits
2. Beatles Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
3. Oasis (What’s the Story) Morning Glory
4. Dire Straits Brothers in Arms
5. Abba Gold – Greatest Hits
6. Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon
7. Queen Greatest Hits 2
8. Michael Jackson Thriller
9. Michael Jackson Bad
10. Madonna The Immaculate Collection

Now, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt, and assume that this is consumer sales and not dealer/distributor sales, and ignore the fact that it probably doesn’t consider returns, unwanted gifts, and albums that are passed straight to the second-hand stores.  I’ll even assume that ‘all time’ only started about 50 years ago.

But even taking this into account, all you have is a list of albums that sold well.  That’s not necessarily a reflection of popularity.  Sure, you think it is – after all, people are voting with their money – but it’s not.  I am one of the several million Britons who own a copy of Sgt. Pepper.  I think I’ve played it twice.  True, it was a landmark album, but really, I can’t listen to it on a regular basis.  And I’d be surprised if there are many people who can.  And Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms only sold well because when CD players came out, it and the loathsome Graceland by Paul Simon were just about the only CDs you could buy.

If I were to list the ten albums that I listen to on a regular basis – and my iTunes ‘Most Frequently Played’ playlist broadly backs me up on this over the past year – it would be (in no particular order):

1. Radiohead OK Computer
2. Desaperacidos Read Music Speak Spanish
3. Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited
4. Jesus and Mary Chain Darklands
5. At The Drive In Relationship of Command
6. Pleasure Forever Altar
7. Oasis Definitely Maybe
8. Suede Dog Man Star
9. Nick Cave Let Love In
10. Bright Eyes Lifted…

Now I’m not saying that these are the greatest albums of all time, or that my list is any more valid than VH1’s – but I own exactly one copy of these albums, along with one copy of Sgt. Pepper, and likewise some 800+ others (so I feel I have a realistically-large sample set).  And I would argue to the last that Sgt. Pepper does not deserve the same magnitude of vote as OK Computer.  By VH1’s reckoning they both get exactly one vote from me, but I would weight OK Computer about 250 times higher, by virtue of the fact that I have probably played it 500 times, to Sgt. Pepper‘s twice.

Now if we could get a complete set of play frequencies from every music consumer in the world, that would give us a better indication of popularity.  But until then (which will be never), the VH1 list, along with all of the other lists (and we can expect a fresh crop of 2006 lists as we approach year-end) will never amount to anything more useful than a way for those of us who take our music seriously to feel superior because we’re not one of the 5 million people who were duped into buying a copy of Queen’s Greatest Hits that’s now gathering dust in the garage pending the next car boot sale.