musical math

i saw a thing the other day and realized some people don’t get how the numbers work…

…but i can’t recall where i saw it. it was snoop dogg and katt williams talking and katt was thanking snoop for helping his career and references the special he did with a snoop intro (i believe it was “it’s pimpin’, pimpin”) and he made reference to “after 65 million sales” or something to that effect.

no, katt, no.

damn, i wish i could remember where i saw it. i don’t think it was on his new special because i haven’t made it too far into it. the last couple of specials the first twenty minutes of his hour long special he spends doing bits about the various part of the town he’s performing in. while the audience loves it, and it makes the performance infinitely more personal to them, when he’s performing in orlando you only get those bits if you live in orlando, or have been to orlando, or at the very least kinda know your chunks of orlando. i am none of the above. and i’ll quickly note, it might not actually be orlando, but it’s some fairly major american city i know jack nor squat about.

back to the topic at hand, though – people always talk numbers when it comes to streaming shit, and they sound monstrous, especially to people my age. we can remember albums or videos selling a couple million copies and that shit was HUGE. but let’s take a look at that latter one for a second because it fits katt’s scenario.

so let’s say a katt williams video was sold to our local video store back in 90’s and they got two copies. on the numbers end it would show TWO sales. but it went to a video store. a few hundred people rented it. usually watched it once or twice, then returned it. this happened several hundred times. then, when all was said and done, they might take one of those copies and sell it used…but because it was sold used, that number didn’t get counted. the person that bought it probably watched it several dozen times themselves. in the streaming world, EVERY SINGLE VIEWING would count towards the number. so, for instance, if it was rented a thousand times, and there were two copies, that’s two thousand counts. but then a few of them watched it more than once, so it was more like 2,500. then they sold it, and the new owner racked up the view number to 2,550.

but on the sales number back in the day that 2,550 would just show a “2”.

pretty big difference.

so don’t let these new streaming numbers fool you – out shit was just as popular, and went out to just as many people per capita, it just didn’t suck as much as some of this newer shit. i’m just sayin’…