Back in the charts
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| Songs and albums with The Beatles and Paul McCartney are charting after Paul’s TV appearance |
In the wake of Paul McCartney’s appearance on The Late Late Show with James Corden recently, Paul and The Beatles had 6 songs in the Top 100 song charts and 7 albums in the Top 100 albums charts of iTunes USA. Among the songs are the two new ones from Paul, while the other Beatles songs were performed during Paul’s “Carpool Karaoke” segment.
Songs:
10. Paul McCartney: Come on to me
20. The Beatles: Let it be
51. Paul McCartney: I don’t know
54. The Beatles: Blackbird
62. The Beatles: Hey Jude
98. The Beatles: Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da
Albums:
21. The Beatles: 1967-1970
51. Paul McCartney: All the best
60. The Beatles: 1962-1966
63. The Beatles
90. The Beatles: Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
As the numbers are changing all the time, the above list just reflects the situation at a given moment during the past weekend. The same tendency is apparent over at Amazon, and as I am writing this, McCartney’s new album “Egypt Station
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| Screen capture from Amazon.com |
At the moment, the official YouTube video of “Carpool Karaoke” with Paul McCartney has been shown more than 16 million times. This number comes in addition to the number of people who watched it on TV in USA and the UK last week. In addition to this are numerous views of the Facebook video of the same segment, which was uploaded by the official Late Late Show Facebook page and that edition of the video has been shared 816 860 times so far. It has been so widespread that people have been updating their profiles of late about how sick and tired they are of everyone posting it! Either way, it looks like McCartney has pulled off quite a successful stunt, boosting sales of both his own songs as well as those of The Beatles.
A bit unfair to call it a “stunt”
It's great to have Paul in the charts, of course, but to be honest, the current way of compiling charts is a complete nonsense, and gives rise to ludicrous results, like having Ed Sheeran with 16 songs in the UK Top 20… It's just not the same any more.
And Drake, recently with nine of the top ten songs on the Billboard Hot 100 (positions 1-5 and 7-10). Imagine if the chart criteria were applied to the Beatles in early 1964 in the US? They’d have every song in the top forty.