The single life


As noted in the last post  Auntie Beeb has been celebrating the Golden Age of The Album with a series of programmes, some of which have been better than others.
Today Britain’s biggest radio station gets in on the act, combining it with a Beatles anniversary and getting a random bunch of ‘famous’ artists to re-record The Beatles Please Please Me in the same 12 hour period that the fab four were allocated.

Are we not all bored of Beatles 50th Anniversaries yet? There are inevitably many more to come. Obviously PPM is far from their best and doesn’t really represent their groundbreaking work in the album format, the recording being merely a representation of their live act at the time. It’s a good programme idea of course and if you’ve got the budget and the cross-promotional abilities of the Beeb (it’ll be an hour-long documentary on BBC4 on Friday) then why not?
As well as being the anniversary of the day The Beatles went to Abbey Road it was also revealed today that Psy’s Gangnam Style had become the latest single to hit a million sales in the UK. The Official Charts Company revealed the 123 million selling singles back in November, since which four others have joined the list  - ‘Gangnam’ of course, 'Call Me Maybe' by Carly Rae Jepsen, 'Impossible' by James Arthur and 'We Are Young' by Fun.

As if to represent the strength of the single at present there have been fifteen ‘million sellers’ in the last three years which means that the current decade is in a good position to usurp the 1990s which had (up to now) produced the highest number of million-selling singles with 32.
The Beatles are on the list a few times of course, if there is something else to celebrate it should be that they were an act who were as capable on single as album format and they were very prolific. There’s a lesson here, perhaps some of our favourite rock acts might learn about it one day.

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