New address

I moving Music Facts to wordpress.com. Here is the new address: http://musicfacts2.wordpress.com/
I think I will have more scope there to customize the layout - without having to learn HTML.

Axis of Awesome - 4 Four Chord Song (with song titles)

Awesome indeed!

Heart And Soul

Blender considers Huey Lewis and The News "Heart And Soul" one of the "50 Worst Songs Ever!" but I must disagree. The first minute or so of the song is pretty catchy. It's a pitty no one compiles a list of fractionally great songs.
And the rest of the list is pretty reasonable and amusing.

Madonna and Glee

"Madonna stands to profit from ‘Glee’ episode" reports MSNBC. The facts:

• Network programs usually have a music budget of around $150,000 to $200,000 and spend about $10,000 to $15,000 to license the right to use a track.
• Madonna, like Led Zeppelin and the Beatle — who has not just a deep catalogue but a strong current fan base — can command about $50,000 a tune
• The “Glee” albums are doing pretty well. “Glee Volume 1,” which came out in November, has sold 776,000 units to date, and “Volume 2,” which came out in December, has sold 574,000.
• Ke$ha... has sold 558,000 units of her album since it came out in January
• Madonna's greatest hits collection "Celebration," which has sold about 218,000 units since it came out in September of 2009, will likely see a bounce from the 2,000 copies a week it’s selling right now
• Madonna's 85-show 2008/2009 Sticky and Sweet world tour grossed over $408 million for the performer and LiveNation

BigChampagne

BigChampagne is an online service that provides a lot of fascinating media consumption information through interactive charts. Unfortunately there is not much content freely provided.
To see their service at work, you can watch a short video here. There is also this NetVibes page they have created. It aggregates a lot of news sources. Worth taking a look.

1001 Albums You Must Hear vs Rolling Stone 500 Greatest Albums

What do the “1001 Albums You Must Hear before You Die” book and the Rolling Stone Magazine “The RS 500 Greatest Albums of All Time” have in common?
315 albums.
The Rolling Stone list has 185 albums absent from the longer list, but 46 of those are compilations, a category that was not included in the 1001 Albums list.
So it is more accurate to say that the Rolling Stone selection includes 139 albums that did not make it to the 1001 Albums selection.
107 artists released those 139 albums. Most of them have other albums mentioned by the 1001 Albums list. The Beatles, for example, have 7 albums in the 1001 list. In the Rolling Stone list, all these 7 are mentioned, plus another 4.
There are however 27 artists that are only mentioned by Rolling Stone. Jackson Browne is mentioned with 3 albums, No Doubt and The Meters have 2 albums each. The other 24 artists include Barry White, Graham Parker, Steve Miller Band and Weezer with one album each.
Sources: 
1001 Albums
RS 500 Albums

Hall & Oates Revival

MSNBC reports, amusingly:

• Hall & Oates is fourth-best-selling duo of all time (13 million albums shipped, according to the Recording Industry Association of America).
• Sales have been on the increase: In 2009, they sold 177,000 albums, up from 161,000 in 2008. In that same time period, digital song downloads were up 19 percent to 547,000.
• In an appearance that veered into the it's-so-uncool-it's-cool territory, late last year Hall & Oates went on QVC to sell their boxed set, "Do What You Want, Be What You Are: The Music of Daryl Hall and John Oates" (RCA/Legacy). QVC may conjure visions of late-night, drug-fueled purchases of vacuum cleaners, but Wolfson cautions people not to mock. "The boxed set sold 5,000 copies the first hour," he says. In total, the $50 set has sold 15,000 copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan, peaking at No. 89 on the Billboard 200.