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Bryan Adams V Drake
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Bryan Adams spent 16 weeks at number 1 in the UK and sold 1,750,000 singles in 1991.
Drake has been at number 1 for 15 weeks- but how many singles has he actually sold?
Bryan adams single was a big power ballad from a blockbuster movie with wide reachiing appeal to people of all ages at at time when the charts meant something .
I have a copy of Bryan Adams single - it is remembered 25 years after it was released and still gets played on TV and the radio today. I somehow think that Drake song will be forgotten in 12 months.
I asked around the office the other day and most people said they havent heard the song- and some people didnt even know who Drake was!
Drake has been at number 1 for 15 weeks- but how many singles has he actually sold?
Bryan adams single was a big power ballad from a blockbuster movie with wide reachiing appeal to people of all ages at at time when the charts meant something .
I have a copy of Bryan Adams single - it is remembered 25 years after it was released and still gets played on TV and the radio today. I somehow think that Drake song will be forgotten in 12 months.
I asked around the office the other day and most people said they havent heard the song- and some people didnt even know who Drake was!
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I hope you've got your passport ready.
For a Drake free zone, I'd suggest Finland as One Dance isn't even top 30 on their singles chart (which is predominantly a Spotify chart) compared to pretty much every other country in the world.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if Drake did remain #1 for 16 weeks but also wouldn't rule out Drake returning to #1 in a few weeks time to extend his number of weeks as the UK #1 single.
LOL
Worse still, remember 2014 when there was a new number one every week for something like 7 months!!!
One Dance is a massive two fingers to all those #1 singles from 2014 that only got there thanks to record company manipulation and pre-orders getting out of control.
The faux outrage on this site (both on this and the other thread) is hilarious. Times have changed, things have moved on, the public consume music in different ways these days. Many chose to stream rather than buy and they are perfectly entitled to do so - as a result it is entirely legitimate that the chart reflects this. Yes, there may be a debate to be had over whether the current weighting of streaming vs download is a fair one, but streaming has to be recognised as a mainstream form of music consumption.
Whether you think One Dance is a great record or a poor one is irrelevant - it remains #1 and deservedly so (in terms of how the official Top 40 is arrived at) - no one is making this stuff up. It's not 1991 anymore. Move on!
There's nothing fake about my outrage!
This cannot and must not be allowed to equal Bryans record.
Well it cant even if it does. Its a different game with different rules and goalposts moved to a different pitch. If anything practical comes out this it will a redefining of chart stats for the very definite sea change that streaming has ushered in-and One Dance will be the longest number one of the streaming era. Nothing more.
Separately I have absolutely no idea what is driving the success of One Dance, what on earth is memorable about it?
Totally agree. Will be interesting to see if any act can get close to Drake's record in the next few years. Any opinion on the better achievement… Drake's 14 weeks at the top (and counting) or Justin Bieber's 1,2 & 3?
People always used to listen to music on the radio (they still do), but the official chart didn't include airplay as playlists could be manipulated by record companies and it wasn't a realistic measure. The same thing goes for streaming playlists, many people might get Drake on their playlist, immediately click onto the next thing rather than listening to the full song, but it still counts as a play.
The data may be genuine, but there's no way of knowing if people are actually choosing to listen to Drake or the same three Justin Bieber songs for months last year or if it just automatically plays for them in the playlists they're listening to.
If streaming counts, things like YouTube views should count as a legitimate measure of music consumption, so the Official Chart Company are actually making it up. It's sales, combined with certain online-based streaming figures, divided by an arbitrary number that somebody decided to value each stream at. If they decide to alter that figure to make streams worth less against sales, that's even more contrived than it is now.
The current chart is deeply flawed and doesn't really reflect what people are listening to at all, to get an exact chart you need all streaming sites included, including all the video sites, you need to include radio listeners, and also measure how many times people are listening to the track they bought. Maybe it's less than a hundred, maybe it's more, but it'll be spread over more than just the one week a purchase counts for in the current system.
It isn't 1991, back then the Radio 1 chart was a legitimate chart based on face that people paid attention to, while the Network Chart was made up nonsense with airplay swaying the figures. Now the Radio 1 chart is a minor show tucked away on Friday with a number one that dropped out of the top 10 of the commercial radio chart at one point (although the iTunes/airplay mix of the BigTop40 is far from perfect either).
Anyway, congratulations to Drake on getting back up to number 8 this week.
Excellent post. Very well put.
In 1994, Wet Wet Wet had their biggest hit, a cover version of The Troggs' single "Love Is All Around", which was used on the soundtrack to the film Four Weddings and a Funeral. It was a huge international success and spent 15 weeks atop the British charts. The week before it could have equalled the record for the longest-standing number-one single, held by Bryan Adams' "(Everything I Do) I Do It for You", Pellow insisted on its deletion because he wanted to focus on getting their next album, Picture This, finished. However, even after its deletion, there were still enough copies in the shops to get the song to number 2 in its 16th week, finally knocked off the top spot by Whigfield's debut single "Saturday Night". In any event, it remained in the Top 40 for the remainder of the year.
As of February 2016, it has sold 1.88 million copies in the United Kingdom, making it the country's best-selling love ballad of all time.
I bet we won't be sharing the same info about Drake in 22 years time!
Indeed, times have definitely changed.
I was 13 in 1994 and everyone saw the charts as the biggest indicator of what was popular. People made the effort to buy a physical copy of their favourite song. Spending 15 or even 16 weeks at #1 in the 90s will be a far bigger achievement than in 2016 because with Spotify you only need to listen to 30 seconds of a track, and I still think there must be hundreds of thousands of Spotify users who just select a playlist and hit play and not even care about half the songs playing. They just want some background music, and if One Dance is benefitting from being "background music" then that's going to be reflected in the charts.
In the 90s I followed the charts with genuine excitement. The whole concept of hearing a song and loving it, going to Woolworths or Our Price to buy the CD single and then listen to the top 40 the following Sunday afternoon on Radio 1 to see where it had entered - and even then to see how the song progressed the following weeks.
I doubt many teenagers today have that same level of interest. There isn't anything these days to draw in the teenagers and get them excited about the charts. They don't have a Top Of The Pops, The Chart Show, CD:UK or any Saturday morning kids TV show where they can watch their favourite artists performing their latest single. It really is a totally different era of the UK charts and it is very much evident in the charts we have today.
You can trace that feeling all the way back to the sixties. I think that's why the state of the current charts mean so much to those of us who took an interest not just in the music but in the stats as well.
I don't think the singles chart is on many peoples radar these days-it was a considerable cross generational event across the nation back in the day.
wks
18 – "I Believe" by Frankie Laine*
16 – "(Everything I Do) I Do It for You" by Bryan Adams
15 – "Love Is All Around" by Wet Wet Wet
15 – "One Dance" by Drake featuring Wizkid and Kyla
14 – "Bohemian Rhapsody" by Queen*
11 – "Rose Marie" by Slim Whitman
10 – "Cara Mia" by David Whitfield
10 – "I Will Always Love You" by Whitney Houston
10 – "Umbrella" by Rihanna featuring Jay Z
* - non consecutive
I love Bryan Adams. I think Run To You is one of my alltime favorite songs of his. He's brilliant.
Agree.