Download music sales drive song to #1 for first time

by on April 3, 2006

The Gnarls Barkley band's "Crazy" hit #1 based on only download sales, the BBC says (as linked to from the band's MySpace page). You can listen to the song on the band's MySpace page.

Thanks to Waxbox for letting us know.

  • I just finished trying to explain to my kids how vinyl records worked, and now I'm going to have to explain what a music store was...

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    I've added a feed auto-discovery feature to Feedlinx (http://www.feedlinx.com). It checks for the standard tags, but it also hunts through all tags too. I'd love to get some feedback on usability. It's working well though my tests, but I need someone to try to break it.
  • Wuuu yeah!! nice post!!!!
  • Mog
    It is possible that download sales have been high enough previously but for some reason there is a restriction in the UK charts that download sales are only counted from 1 week before the CD release. If it isn't released on CD it can't get into the charts.

    The CD single was released yesterday (Monday, April 3rd) so the downloads were eligable for last weeks charts. Everyone was expecting it to go to No. 1 on downloads alone so I suspect it had already been selling large quantities before.
  • Hehe, 15 minutes of fame come my way and what am I doing? Sleeping! :)
  • Nice blog, Scobleizer!
  • Hey Robert, nice to hear the UK is not off your radar!

    I believe that the combined downloads of Crazy were 31,000 (not a great deal int eh scheme of things!), but what makes the whoel thing so fascinating is that it originated on an "indie, new music" show on BBC Radio 1.

    It played once or twice, got played again, then soon featured on a BBC TV ad for BBC Radio 1 (go figure?!).

    The ad for the "in new music we trust" Radio 1 strapline created a cult following (very cool ad!).

    Since then, competing commercial radio stations have been inundated with requests to play "that radio 1 TV advert song".

    Only recently have downloads become permissable for inclusuion into the charts (no doubt something to do with the industry having to appear in good shape), because if 31,000 sales can reach number 1m the industry is in poor shape!
  • This gives my crappy band some hope.
  • Christopher Coulter
    Whatever happened to like double or triple platinum? Under 100,000 doesn't even get you on NYT best seller list. Rather than a praise, it be a damning incidment of how poor online sales actually are. Gives a whole new meaning to the one-hit wonder catch phrase; one hit hot momentary download. Hopefully for them it translates into real sales, or they will be thought of as "just another MySpace demographic flash-in-the-pan". And they owe more than half of it to the Gorillaz linking.
  • @Mr. coulter-
    gnarles barkley are more a product of stereogum and other a-list mp3 blogs. myspace is just a way for people to keep track of bands they already know.

    and since NYT's best seller list isn't for the UK, i hardly see how it's relavent.
  • Gnarls Barkley is a project by DJ Danger Mouse, who made his name with the highly illegal "Grey Album" mashup of the Beatles' White Album with Jay-Z's Black Album. After getting a cease-and-desist from copyright owner EMI, he was promptly hired to produce the most recent Gorillaz album, out now on EMI (ha ha).

    What's funny about this is that while illegal Internet file-sharing basically made Danger Mouse's career and downloads appear to have played a role in the initial success of this project, the promo CDs for the full-length Gnarls Barkley album are watermarked and individually labeled with the reviewer's name and publication to prevent leakage.
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