I was shocked a while ago to learn in terms of certified sales from around the world that Drake is the number 1 artist of all time. Ahead of Elvis, the Beatles you name it. Now this is partly due to the modern era having certification of sales in many more countries than was the case back in day but it’s still shocking at least to me.
Also: Inflation.
Those dollars don’t go nearly as far as they once did.
In the days of Elvis and even The Beatles, record albums were fairly significant purchases. When I was a teen, I worked part time for $2.65 an hour and LPs at that time were running upwards of $8.98 - or about four hours of pay for me. So I did not buy too many albums back then.
It was considered rather significant for a music artist to sell 500,000 albums back in those days. When "Rumours" by Fleetwood Mac moved 20 million units in 1977, well that was seen as simply a staggering sales number.
Nowadays, a newly released album by a big name artist can routinely stream 20 million times the first week of release.
Country artist Morgan Wallen released an album earlier this year ("One Thing At A Time") and it has streamed 3,500,000,000 billion times since (3.5 billion).
The most streamed album of all time is Bad Bunny's “Un Verano Sin Ti” which has streamed an incredible 14,500,000,000,000 times since it's 2022 release (and that's on Spotify alone).
It's a new world out there.