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The world’s most profitable songs

The BBC recently transmitted a programme (over Christmas 2012) which they called The World’s Richest Songs. In the programme they tried to find the Top 10 songs that had earned the most money ever. Now this is quite a task, and obviously to get really precise numbers is nigh impossible, but the programme was rather interesting, especially in what tunes it found to be the most profitable.

On hearing about this programme my natural instinct was to guess what the top few might be: Candle In The Wind, maybe We Are The Champions, Titanic Theme Tune, I Will Always Love You, maybe Everything I Do, I Do It For You? Basically recent big hits of the last 20 odd years or so.

Well I could not have been more wrong. In fact there was only one song that you could, by a real stretch, be called modern, and that was Sting’s “Every Breath You Take”. That was written way back in 1983, and I was amazed that it even made the list. So what are the top 10 richest songs according to the BBC? Here they are:

1. Happy Birthday to you
2. White Christmas
3. You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling
4. Yesterday
5. Unchained Melody
6. Stand By Me
7. Santa Claus Is Coming To Town
8. Every Breath You Take
9. Pretty Woman
10. Chestnuts Roasting On An Open Fire

Surprised? Yeah, me too. For a start there are three Christmas tunes, only one Beatles tune and nothing really modern. So how could this list make sense? Well if you think about what makes money, you really need something that will sell all the time, and Christmas tunes sell every Christmas as long as they remain popular. Then, on further reflection, one realises that the older the tune the more time it has had to make money, even if it is only for 4-6 weeks a year (as with Christmas tunes). If you check the history of Stand By Me (written in 1960), that became a bigger hit second time round, as it was re-released to coincide with the movie of the same name it was used for in 1986. Every Breath You Take also had two bites at the cherry, as it featured in the charts in the original The Police version in 1983, and then again with Puff Daddy’s (aka P Diddy, Piddle Diddle, Piffle, or whatever he calls himself now) highly successful cover version in 1997. In fact White Christmas was US No.1 three times: in 1942, 45 and 46. The record was so popular, Bing Crosby had to re-record it, as the master tape had worn out, after so many copies had been pressed from it. Another curious fact is that most modern Christmas tunes were secular in nature (no mention of Jesus Christ, Bethlehem, Mary etc, but instead of Santa Claus, Father Christmas, Rudolph), and were in fact written by Jewish song-smiths.

So how does this list compare to the highest-grossig movies ever? The current list (Jan 2013) looks thus:

1. Avatar
2. Titanic
3. The Avengers (Assemble)
4. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2
5. Transformers: Dark of the Moon
6. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
7. The Dark Knight Rises
8. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest
9. Toy Story 3
10. Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

So pretty much very different to our Top 10 music list. But if we now recalculate the list, in the only way which is fair, which is inflation adjusted, suddenly we get a similar phenomenon as with our music Top 10:

1. Gone with the Wind
2. Avatar
3. Star Wars
4. Titanic
5. The Sound of Music
6 E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
7. The Ten Commandments
8. Doctor Zhivago
9. Jaws
10. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

So loads of oldies but goldies that had had decades to keep raking in the cash.

Fascinating stuff.

Dave Brubeck – A Tribute

Dave Brubeck, jazz pianist and composer died on the 5th of December 2012, just one day short of his 92nd birthday. With his loss we have had to say goodbye to the last remaining Jazz great from the Golden Age of Jazz.

Though much younger than such jazz icons as Louis Armstrong, Count Basie or Duke Ellington, Brubeck belonged to the generation of Jazz musicians who came to the fore in the 50s and 60s through Cool Jazz. Though he never played with Miles Davis (Davis was born in 1926, Brubeck in 1920), he was his contemporary, and this vanguard of artists were the ones who made jazz a popular art form in the late 50’s and 60′ – a period that can now regarded as the heyday of jazz, when Jazz musicians might be on the cover of magazines, spotted in St Tropez and sought after for interviews.

Dave Brubeck is most commonly associated with the music of his famous quartet, which featured Paul Desmond on Alto Sax, Joe Morello on drums and either Eugene Wright or Joe Benjamin on Bass. The line-up featuring Brubeck and Desmond was active from 1952 till 1968, and the so-called Classic Quartet mentioned earlier was together from 1958 – 1968. The quartet wrote jazz history with the release of the classic album Time Out in 1959, which included the jazz hit Take Five (which was written in 5/4 time). Although Brubeck wrote almost all the compositions for the quartet, it is ironic that the tune they are most identified with, Take Five, was actually penned by Desmond. The album consisted of tunes in odd time signatures, and the label, Columbia, had to actually be talked into releasing the album, as they thought it was far too advanced for the listening public! The follow-up album, Time Further Out, also included the hit Unsquare Dance (in 7/4 time). Brubeck and Desmond were musically, on paper at least, an unlikely paring. Desmond, lyrical and soft, Brubeck rhythmic and, as his critics would point out, at time thunderous and heavy-handed. But opposites clearly attracted and this musical partnerhsip created some of the most wonderful music of the 20th century.

When I started learning jazz, and started playing Brubeck’s pieces, I often struggled playing the left hand – I could not imagine how anyone could play such large intervals. Some years later I went to see Brubeck play (this was in the last 90s) in Frankfurt, and my Dad persuaded the security people to allow us backstage, and I could meet the great man. He was incredibly friendly and courteous, even though endless scores of people wanted to meet him. And I got to shake his hand, and suddenly the riddle of how he could play those patterns in the left hand was solved. Brubeck had the most enormous hands, and had he been English, he would have made a great slip fielder in cricket. He also signed my favourite cd of his quartet: Jazz Themes of Eurasia. My mother said that when she heard that Paul Desmond had died (aged 52 in 1977) she cried – I would have only been two years old, so cannot remember this. But I can recall feeling a similar shock when my piano playing heroes Kenny Kirkland and Esbjörn Svenson died before their time. When musicians are lost to the world far too early in their lifetime, there is a real sense of loss, of what could have been. With Dave Brubeck we can celebrate a lifetime of achievement, and salute and say farewell to the last remaining Jazz greats.

Thank you for all the great music, Dave.

Lincoln Jaeger

Very Short Single Hits

In a world where albums contain more music than we may have dared to dream of many years ago, there still remains the ability for artists to write really short songs. The “ideal” length is around 3 minutes as that seems to fit nicely with airplay concerns for radio DJs. That hasn’t stopped there being monster length songs like Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody mind you which comes in just shy of 6 minutes.

The Chemical Brothers’ No Path to Follow which contains repetitive “lyrics” which become clearer in its 1 minute 4 second life is pretty short by any standards. There’s little merit to it either. That song wasn’t a hit by itself but it is the opening track on the We Are The Night album which entered the charts at Number 1.

Brevity is not a new tack taken for singles. The song All I Can Do from The Carpenters comes in at under 2 minutes. Maybe that, 2 minutes, should be the bar, a little musical pun there, by which we measure (ok, ok no more). I did say it was not uncommon and in fact It’s Not Unusual. Performed by Tom Jones for just 1 minute 58 seconds long it was a massive hit and remains very popular today. Short can be sweet!

Others include The White Stripes – Fell in Love With a Girl, The Beatles – I’m Happy Just To Dance With You and The Rolling Stones with Not Fade Away. Some great songs there proving we love quality and not quantity.

Walking Piano Experiment

So this is fun. As part of an advertising campaign a well-known German car manufacturer decided to see if people in a Stockholm tube station were more likely to use the stairs than the escalator, if they made it more fun to use the stairs.

So how do you make it more fun to use the stairs? You make them into a piano (a walking piano). Remember the scene from Big where Tom Hanks plays on a walking piano in the children’s toy store? That’s a walking piano.

The result is rather good fun to watch, and 66% of people preferred to use the stairs rather than the escalator.

Great fun – one thing did strike me, though, which is that this did not look like a particularly busy tube station. I wonder what would have happened had they installed this in a New York or London subway/tube station. Maybe in such busy cities, where people have less time for each other and are always in a rush there may have been the odd dissaproving look?

Anyway, let’s enjoy this cool video:

Can you tell who it is yet?

… this post has been removed as it featured Rolf Harris.

Gangnam Style Takes The World By Storm

Well how did that happen? Korean raper PSY (real name Park Jae-sang) releases his single Gangnam Style on the 15th of July, and a few months later it is a world-wide hit, taking everyone, including PSY, by surprise. I think it’s all to do with the dance. Remember The Ketchup Song, which had a similarrly catchy dance attached to the song? Or YMCA?

It’s great when you have these global events, when one song or movie or event takes the whole world by storm, and even has tufty world-leaders joining in (see heads of state trying to perform “Gangnam Style”). The tune is in the style of K-pop (Korean Pop Music), and of course we have the sheet music for it here.

But where does “Gangnam” come from. Well it apparently refers to the Gangnam district in Seoul, which is one of the most well-off parts of the Korean capital, hence the references to Gangnam style, i.e. living it up.

Here is the official video:

This video is also quite funny, where PSY is helping teach the commentary team from BBC One’s Formula One coverage the Gangnam dance during the Korean Grand Prix (Former F1 driver David Coulthard, former F1 team owner Eddie Jordan and presenter Jake Humphrey are trying out their dance moves here)

Mumford & Sons Equal The Chart Record Set By The Beatles

English folk rock band Mumford & Sons have equalled the Beatles’ record of havgin 6 tunes in the American Billboard Top 100.

The Beatles set this record as long ago as 1964 – to put this into historical context this was the year that the death penalty was abolished in Great Britain, Nelson Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment, interest rates in England were at 7% and a loaf of bread cost 21 cents in the US. Seems like a long time ago?

All 6 tracks in the current top 100 are from the new Mumford & Sons album Babel, which became the band’s first UK Number One Album.

Here is the video for Little Lion Man

New Madness Album due in November

3 years after their last album, The Liberty of Norton Folgate which reached the number 5 slot in the UK album charts in 2009, Madness are set to release their next in November 2012. Entitled Oui Oui Si Si Ja Ja Da Da, the band are teasing us all with the expected mixture of reggae, ska, 2-tone and pop by allowing a free download of one of the tracks, Death of a Rude Boy. Starting with a driving beat, the song then gently erupts into comforting brass sound of the band but quickly gives way to a fresh new electronic sound. Unmistakeably Madness, Suggs’ voice is as fresh it has ever been. The song is quite dark, as the title hints but it has a lighter approach with it’s variation in vocal and instruments making it compelling listening. This is going straight on my MP3 player.

Madness

Learn more about Madness on our website

Coldplay announce 2012 Mylo Xylotl Live Album and Concert DVD

Hi There

Coldplay have just announced that they will be realising a live album and live concert dvd to go alongside the hugely successful album Mylo Xylotl, which was released last year (2011). The band commented:

“We don’t tell anyone all the darker side of things, We’ve been through all the break-ups and addictions and all that. But we have a chemistry that no one else in the world has so we don’t mess with it.”?

Mylo Xylotl included the singles Every Teardrop Is A Waterfall Paradise, Charlie Brown, Princess Of China and Hurts Like Heaven, and reached the Number One album slot in no less than 34 countries.