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This ridiculous stat proves people still aren't done with 'Mr. Brightside'

COMING OUTTA MY CAGE AND I'LL BE DOING JUST FINE

This ridiculous stat proves people still aren't done with 'Mr. Brightside'

It’s 3am, everyone’s pissed, nobody is coherent, someone has probably taken their top off for no real or explicable reason. What are you listening to?

TRICK QUESTION. You are listening to ‘Mr. Brightside’. Obviously you are listening to ‘Mr. Brightside’. There is no other song you could possibly be listening to at this specific moment other than ‘Mr. Brightside’. 

And you’re not alone, according to the BPI’s latest figures – ‘Mr. Brightside’ was the most streamed pre-2010 song of 2016, and the most popular song from the ‘00s. 

The Killers made about £115,000 in royalties from 26 million streams – working out at about 0.004p per stream, sort of depressingly. 

Other retro hits include ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You’ (17 million streams), Wham!’s ‘Last Christmas’ (13 million streams), Stevie Wonder’s ‘Superstition’ (11 million) and ‘Ain't No Mountain High Enough’ (10 million). 

But the most streamed song of the year, played 141 million times, was ‘One Dance’ by Drake – the only song of the lot to hit 100 million streams.

Including CD and vinyl purchases, digital downloads and streams, David Bowie was the most listened to artist in the UK overall. 

The BPI report also contains a bunch of other juicy, juicy stats about streaming:

  • Streaming is proving good for the music industry, it turns out – industry income was at its highest in five years, up by a whole 5%
     
  • The best selling album of 2016 was...not very cool, it turns out. 867,959 copies sold of ‘Now 95’ made it the top album of the year
     
  • Brits aren’t faring very well, though – artists like Drake and Biebs are “forcing British artists out of the charts”. And you thought one Brexit was bad enough
     
  • 375,000 albums sold “at least one copy”, which doesn’t sound like that many in the grand scheme of things and is therefore a kind of depressing stat
     
  • Most streaming happens on a Friday, what with all those shiny new releases, but Saturday still remains the most popular day for IRL purchases of CDs and vinyl 

OH OK FINE. TAKE YOUR TOP OFF THEN.