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You Don’t Listen to Music with a Calculator. But Metrics Matter More than Ever

Fans are conflating sales quantity with artistic supremacy

One thing I’ve never thought was, “Hmm, this album sold a lot of records. Maybe I should check it out.” Historically, it’s been rare to see the bestselling records among the most well reviewed. The top-selling acts of the ’90s were Mariah Carey, Céline Dion, and Garth Brooks, all popular artists who weren’t the critical darlings of their time. Michael Jackson’s Thriller is probably the biggest outlier; you could also look to the Beatles’ discography for a direct correlation between high quality of art and large quantity sold.

But after a few hours of wading through today’s increasingly toxic online discourse, you might come away with the idea that sales numbers are by far the most important marker of quality for music fans. The discourse around new album releases has devolved into a morass of faceless avatars spouting industry jargon at each other online, civilians cosplaying as major label executives and A&Rs when they actually have no professional stake in the chart performance of whatever pop single they’re evangelizing for.

Social media accounts and personalities, like Chart Data, Talk of the Charts, Pop Base, Pop Crave, Kurrco, and DJ Akademiks, are mostly content aggregators, resharing what artists post on social media as their own content. But one major and consistent part of the content strategy for these accounts is the way that they repurpose sales data: intentionally enflaming and emboldening various fandoms across the stanosphere into commenting, liking, and sharing their posts.

These pages market themselves as sources for daily music news and updates, but what this form of online discourse actually does is cultivate a hostile social media environment where first-week sales have been turned into something that the audience cares about and posts about, where the winners are those who sell the most records and the losers are only mentioned to highlight their futility.

In September 2024, Tommy Richman, coming off the success of two hit singles, released his debut album. He opted to take a risk by leaving his singles off, attempting to let his artistry speak for itself. It backfired mightily, all but muffling the buzz that he had previously garnered. And the blogs were first in line to publicly humiliate him for it. Kurrco posted “Tommy Richman’s debut album ‘COYOTE’ reportedly sold ~3.4K units first week” seemingly with the expectation that the internet would pile on and clown the “Million Dollar Baby” singer. At the time of writing, that post had 1.1 million impressions on X.

I’d predict that many of the people who saw Kurrco’s post were unaware that Tommy Richman had even released his album. I know I was. This post likely succeeded in tainting the public’s perception of the release before they’d even heard it, while subsequently influencing how it will be listened to in the future.

Not all albums are hits right away. Now considered an all-time classic of East Coast hip-hop, Nas’s Illmatic sold a paltry 59,000 units in its first week in 1994. Its longevity was secured by universal critical praise and underground street buzz. Most of my favourite albums didn’t resonate with me on first listen; it was only after some time and repeated exposure that things clicked into place.

Lorde’s Melodrama, a dense, writerly art pop album, didn’t connect with me upon its initial 2017 release but has since burrowed its way past my defences almost a decade later. Would I have even bothered to put myself through the trouble of listening again if an account I trusted made a post implying how crappy it was right after it came out?

To consider how we arrived at the point where sales are seen as a definitive measure of quality, we have to examine the past. Started in 1958, the Billboard Hot 100 chart evolved from several early incarnations to become the first reliable way to........

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