songs that weren't a bands biggest hit, but have gone on to be their legacy song and biggest iTunes seller

Bootylicious got its title into the OED tho.

("Quaint and coy" otm then maybe?)

just noticed another addition to the billion club: "back in black"

"Highway to Hell" and "Thunderstruck" closing in as well

Is AC/DC's biggest hit the one that charted highest on average across the main territories where the band was popular (You Shook Me All Night Long), or based on sales certifications (maybe Back in Black), or average both of those concepts (maybe Highway to Hell or Thunderstruck)? I believe I have never heard of their top charting US single, something called Moneytalks, the followup to Thunderstruck; appropriately, this track is not in their top 10 plays.

I wonder why You Shook Me has drifted to the bottom of the pack compared to the other three songs, is it too pop metal? Anyway Back in Black is a good legacy song, it seems like the "ultimate" hard rock song to me, a kind of distillation of the rhythmic crunch, bizarre caterwauling and startlingly disjointed yet satisfying riff-cobbling of Zeppelin with the lyrical focus more on partying than the hippie rabbit holes beloved by Plant. Highway to Hell is a little more by-the-numbers, it's a decent glam-rock chorus appended to a nice signature AC/DC quadrilateral diagram riff. Thunderstruck is a bit funny, it's like a geezer trying to use Van Halen style shredding as the basis for a riff rather than a solo, and not being able to play it fast enough anyway.

AC/DC's being more popular now than Zeppelin or GnR seems as unlikely to me as Queen's ascension. Although I see that currently Elton is doing monthly numbers far in excess of Queen, perhaps his top songs will gradually catch up, or it's a temporary thing caused by whatever "Cold Heart PNAU Remix" is. I tried to listen to it and started laughing when Dua interpolated Rocket Man. It currently has more plays than any of Elton's legacy hits...

Money Talks is an earworm for sure but it's not that representative as an AC/DC song

ac/dc has always been wildly popular, i'm not surprised that they're outpacing zep or gnr in terms of monthly listeners. i think their relative lack of variation helps in this regard - if you're in the mood for some ac/dc, you can just throw on that "this is: ac/dc" playlist and get exactly what you're expecting

Yeah I'm not surprised at all, Zep and GnR were very tied to a specific scene/time period, AC/DC (like the Ramones, Motörhead) always sounded more timeless.

GnR (at 21.9 million) is only 1.2 million monthly listeners behind AC/DC. It's not a huge difference.

Sure but that includes a large cohort of legacy fans - I think the observation is that AC/DC is attracting more young listeners than GnR.

Oh, I know Moneytalks, I just checked. Yes it's an earworm that I used to hear every week when I worked in warehouses overnight putting myself through college. It seems uncharacteristic of the band that the riff is so generic and subservient to the vocal hook.

Good points about AC/DC winning out due to being more samey and timeless. But this seems the opposite of why Queen won out over other 20th century pop artists, they are stylistically diverse and unrepresentative of the mega-genre "20th century pop". So much for my trying to come up with grand theories I guess.

It's hard to really draw conclusions from streaming stats - those are largely driven by the money that artists/labels are willing to pump into the platforms, it's hard to get a good feeling how many of these streams actually represent listeners preferences - it might just be the case that the AC/DC estate is paying Spotify/Google/Apple a lot more to push its songs into listeners playlists than GnR's management.

In a sense that's the modern way to secure your legacy - instead of spending your efforts on tours for your old fans, spend it on pulling the next generation on board: produce a biopic, get on soundtrack of a movie with a young audience, do a remix with a current artist, hand over cash to Spotify/Apple, etc. Elton John clearly has been better at that game than Axl Rose or Robert Plant.

the three cities with the largest population of ac/dc spotify listeners: mexico city, sao paulo, and santiago

Achilles Last Stand (Taylor's Version) feat. Robert Plant and Jack Harlow

That's funny. Looks like those megacities are also doing the biggest numbers for GnR, Twisted Sister, Bon Jovi, Zep, Pink Floyd, etc.

Some of that is how cities are spatially coded, at least according to Glenn three years ago: but also our third-party geocoding treats Mexico City as one giant single place, where it breaks NYC up into boroughs, for example.

Spotify - anyone heard of it?

Afroman's follow up to "Because I Got High" named "Crazy Rap" (not a hit at all in the US or much of anywhere but admittedly it did hit #10 on the UK charts) has 212M streams on Spotify as compared to 132M for "Because I Got High". Incidentally, reviewing his discography on Wikipedia I see he has released 16 full length studio albums plus 13 mixtapes.

crazy rap aka colt 45 is definitely a cult hit (no pun intended)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPmvyV2v_HY

the Charlie's Angels reference in "Independent Women" might have hurt its long term appeal

yeah that was always a bit unnecessary

had no idea Afroman had a another hit, but am enjoying the aptly titled Crazy Rap now

charming lyrics

Enola Gay has about twice the streams of If You Leave, which surprises me, and more than Souvenir, Joan of Arc and Maid of Orleans combined as well.

They didn't really have any 'hits' by most (if not all) metrics, but I find it funny that Be Your Own Pet's biggest Spotify song by a large margin is "Becky", which their US label purposely cut from their second album for being "too violent".

Was it on this borad or elsewhere where there was a funny discussion yesterday of OMD’s early sartorial changes?

Found it: Joy Division: Classic Or Dud?

I guess the popularity of Frozen and 4 Minutes is a shock, but more so; how far down the list Holiday and Into The Groove are.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FVLTlvAVIAAAoxK?format=jpg

at least Frozen is good

Hung Up?

What's the story with Material Girl being #1? I loved it when I was a kid but it didn't feel like top-tier canon as I grew up.

“4 Minutes” is surprisingly high, I agree, but “Frozen”’s popularity shouldn’t come as a shock at all. It has been revived on TikTok in recent months by way of a sort-of-trap remix by producer Sickick, and this had led to a whole cottage industry brazenly overseen by Madonna herself. for one, it gave her an opportunity to jump on the afropop train - she hired Fireboy DML for one of the remixes of the remix:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxKRdL1N9os

(many people in Nigeria are *not at all* happy about the imagery here)

more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frozen_(Madonna_song)#Sickick_remixes

who would have predicted Madonna and Prince having fewer monthly listeners than Kate Bush?

Hung Up?

too low!

"Hung Up" is a great song, but only insofar as "Gimme Gimme Gimme" is a great song— without the ABBA hook, it's nothing. That said, the melodic line of "Gimme Gimme Gimme" is so good that it occasionally brings tears to my eyes, so I love "Hung Up" as unreservedly as I love "Gimme Gimme Gimme."

Alice In Chains' 4th biggest Spotify track (after "Man In The Box", "Would?", and "Rooster") is "Nutshell", an EP cut from Jar of Flies that's outpaced all of their more well-known acoustic cuts.

It was briefly mentioned above, but I was quite surprised to learn that The Offspring's most streamed song from the 90s is "The Kids Aren't Alright", by quite a wide margin over #2 ("Self Esteem"). Their actual most streamed song is their 2008 comeback hit "You're Gonna Go Far Kid"

fun fact-- the Offspringer's ex-drummer (fired for not vaxxing) plays on Tim Pool's shitty song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOfvaUwWi2k

I feel like "The Kids Aren't Alright" is the only Offspring song I've heard on the radio in the last 10 years. I can definitely see it having more long term success despite being less of a hit at the time than some other songs.

And I guess that would be the case for a lot of songs in this thread, songs that maybe don't make as much of an impression initially but that for whatever reason have more staying power.

Yeah, the two Americana singles I remember from the radio at the time are "Pretty Fly..." and to a much lesser extent "She's Got Issues".

Was "Original Prankster" a single? I seem to remember it was.

On the next album.

"Original Prankster" being their attempt to make that "Pretty Fly..." lightning strike twice.

Bryan Adams' "Summer of '69" got to number 5 in the US, but it didn't break the top 40 in the UK and my recollection is that it wasn't played on the radio much when I was young - "Run to You" was his signature song from that period. It sold nowhere near as well as "Everything I Do", but according to Last.fm it's his most-streamed song. I'm not sure how broad Last.fm's charts are.

The same charts show that Nik Kershaw's "The Riddle" is his most-streamed song, which is curious. I've always assumed it was more a historical curiosity than something people actually listened to. "Wouldn't it be Good" was his masterwork. But people really do prefer "The Riddle". Perhaps they're still trying to work out what it means. I've always liked the chord progression. It goes all wiggly, as if he was showing off.

I could go the rest of my life without streaming anything by Bryan Adams.

Pulling up "The Kids Aren't Alright"...Yeah, I know this from a bunch of ads and Movie/TV soundtracks.

The long, slow ascent of Summer Of 69 in the UK is a mysterious thing, and I’m not sure how it happened.

American emigrants, no doubt.

*Canadian emigrants

Are those last.fm charts UK-specific? Because there's a country of 1B people that fucking love Bryan Adams and "Summer of '69" in particular (10yo article but still relevant): https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2011/02/11/bryan_adams_star_burns_brightly_in_india.html

From this year: https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/as-bryan-adams-releases-his-15th-album-heres-a-love-letter-to-indias-favourite-canadian-rocker-10436661.html

https://slate.com/podcasts/hit-parade/2022/09/pop-chart-flops-can-turn-into-latter-day-classics

What do you call a song that bombed on the charts back in the day, that now booms out of radios and streaming apps nationwide? Chris Molanphy has a name for these songs: legacy hits. Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer.” Etta James’s “At Last.” The Romantics’ “What I Like About You.” Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes.” Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime.”

Many catalysts can change a song’s trajectory, from movie scenes to stadium singalongs, wedding DJs to evolving tastes. Sometimes the hivemind just collectively decides that this Whitney Houston hit, not that one, is her song for the ages.

Join Chris as he explains how the charts sometimes get it wrong, and how legacy hits correct the record—and counts down 10 of his favorite flops-turned-classics.