DuranDuran
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Re: streaming
That can be said about anything, like pre-Soundscan & post Soundscan, or the album era to the era of the 78s when there was no albums. Pre-Soundscan, only 6 albums debuted at #1 (in the USA), and 2 of them were by Elton John. Post-Soundscan, it happened all the time. The record clubs (12 albums for a penny!) were not counted as official sales (for the RIAA) or for Billboard chart criteria. So artists didn't really make money from them. Some used record stores would not accept record club stuff either, they had a different barcode from the official albums from the record labels and also the club name printed on the record cover. Pre-1970s, the average act released 2 or 3 albums a year and in some cases non-album singles in addition to that, because that's what labels required then. Thriller's sales would not have happened if it was released in the 1960s. One man band albums like Prince couldn't have happened pre-1970s either, because it was impossible with the studio technology then. A lot of The Beatles sales happened after they broke up, not while they were an active group. Especially when the albums were re-released on CD in the late 1980s, and several times after that. Baby boomers bought them multiple times and other records like Dark Side Of The Moon by Pink Floyd. So you could say the blockbuster album era starting in the mid 1970s shouldn't be compared to the 1960s and before. But it is. Should today's era of 600 cable/sattelite TV channels be compared to when it was only the 3 networks and more people watched the same thing and there was no remote control?That's all fine and good. We all know that the way people consume music is a lot different now to what it was in the 80s. That's why we shouldn't combine pre streaming and streaming achievements.