‘Crazy’ Single, No. 1 Solely Through Downloads

“Crazy” by U.S. duo Gnarls Barkley sat atop the British singles chart Monday — the first track to reach No. 1 based solely on computer download sales.

The single by the pseudonymous Barkley — U.S. producer Danger Mouse and hip-hop artist Cee-Lo — went on sale in record stores Monday. But it had already sold 31,000 copies through the Internet, making it the previous week’s best-selling track.

I think that’s cool…
This is a very important point in the history of online music distribution, showing how much it is maturing as a medium.

I wonder how far away we are from when a movie will hit the No. 1 spot based solely on downloads. It will take a lot of fat broadband connections, but nevertheless it’s possible.

[Source: CNN]

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Mohamed Marwen Meddah

Mohamed Marwen Meddah is a Tunisian-Canadian, web aficionado, software engineering leader, blogger, and amateur photographer.

3 thoughts on “‘Crazy’ Single, No. 1 Solely Through Downloads”

  1. Hi Marwen! See the problem with this I find is while downloads are seemingly good for the industry, they are nothing but revenue raising.

    1. You don’t get a physical copy.
    2. No CD booklet for lyrics/credits/artwork.
    3. Once you buy the download, if it gets deleted, you can’t access it again.
    4. The file quality is much lesser compared to CD.
    5. Record companies claim more money goes to artists, but for 99 cents per song, that equates to roughly 3 cents per song for the artist in question, if its a band they wont even get 1 cent.
    6. Most CDs include bonus music videos/DVDs with music videos, which are not offered, if they were they would probably only be MQ WMV quality (but I doubt that since it uses up too much bandwidth = less profit)

    I’m not familiar with these services, the only time I used it was to buy the Australian Idol single immediately after the winner was annouced & though the price was $1.49 I had to use my credit card which in my case (& im sure for others as well) incurs fees for each transaction which isn’t efficient either.

    So basically I don’t why so many people see it as an excellent theory, its just making record companies richer than ever.

  2. Personally, I totally agree with you. Downloading comes nowhere close to the CD experience.
    Just like ebooks come nowhere close to a real book.

    What I’m excited about though is how the internet is changing certain businesses and adding new channels and formats of distribution.

  3. I’m excited too, our official music sales chart ARIA will include a digital track chart from this Sunday, but this is for tracks ONLY, not singles with which they are planning to merge together later this year. None of the Australian online music stores offer actual singles online, they are only single tracks.

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