"Hollaback Girl" by Gwen Stefani was the first song in history to surpass 1 million downloads. "Right Round" by Flo Rida holds the record for the largest debut/overall sales week for a male for a
For centuries, opera reigned supreme, and the first record that sold one million copies is a composition you're likely unfamiliar with. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, it's 'Vesti La Giubba', which translates to 'put on the costume'.
1957: Max Mathews of Bell Labs recorded the first computer-generated music, a 17-second piece called "The Silver Scale" composed by his co-worker Newman Guttman.
Twenty years ago, on June 27, 1994, Geffen Records made history when it released the first major label song for exclusive digital download. The song was Aerosmith's “Head First,” an unused cut from the Get a Grip sessions. Ten thousand CompuServe subscribers downloaded it in eight days.
In September 1997, Capitol Records made history by releasing Duran Duran's "Electric Barbarella" on the internet as the first-ever digital single for sale, heralding a massive shift in how the music…
The first number-one song of the Billboard Hot 100 was "Poor Little Fool" by Ricky Nelson, on August 4, 1958. As of the issue for the week ending on June 17, 2023, the Billboard Hot 100 has had 1,149 different number-one entries.
The birth of electronic music in the United States most likely started in 1939 when a musician, John Cage, published his composition, Imaginary Landscape, No. 1, utilizing various mediums and sound sources such as two variable-speed turntables, frequency recordings, muted piano, and cymbal.
The first commercial digital recordings were released in 1971. The BBC also began to experiment with digital audio in the 1960s. By the early 1970s, it had developed a 2-channel recorder, and in 1972 it deployed a digital audio transmission system that linked their broadcast center to their remote transmitters.
The song "Tom's Diner" by Suzanne Vega was the first song used by Karlheinz Brandenburg to develop the MP3 format.
“Hurrian Hymn No. 6” is considered the world's earliest melody, but the oldest musical composition to have survived in its entirety is a first century A.D. Greek tune known as the “Seikilos Epitaph.” The song was found engraved on an ancient marble column used to mark a woman's gravesite in Turkey.
Prince was the first major artist to distribute an album exclusively online, though he later decided to release the record on disc. He continued releasing music over the Web after leaving his record label, Warner Bros., in the mid-1990s.
In 1951, a BBC outside broadcast unit used a portable acetate disc cutter to capture three melodies played by the computer at Alan Turing's Computing Machine Laboratory in Manchester. This is the first known recording of computer-generated music.
Seven years ago, Drake became the first artist to have a song reach one billion plays on Spotify with his smash "One Dance," from the 2016 album "Views." As the streaming service has grown, songs can generate huge streaming numbers quickly.
Billion-View Club. An early metric of a video's popularity was the so-called Billion-View Club, denoting videos which had succeeded in reaching over 1 billion views since their initial upload. In December 2012, "Gangnam Style" became the first video to reach one billion views.
Only 22 albums in history have sold 1 million copies in a single week — here they all are.
Since October 2004, digital sales have been incorporated into many of Billboard's music singles charts. The decision was based on the dramatic increase of the digital market while commercial single sales in a physical format were becoming negligible.
The first use of the term digital art was in the early 1980s when computer engineers devised a paint program which was used by the pioneering digital artist Harold Cohen. This became known as AARON, a robotic machine designed to make large drawings on sheets of paper placed on the floor.
Considered the first important work of electronic music, Déserts became the first piece transmitted in stereo on French radio. Varèse returned to New York and stayed there for the next two years until he was asked to compose a piece for the world's fair in Brussels. The result was Poeme Electronique, completed in 1958.
The oldest song is Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" (1975), while the youngest song is Harry Styles's "As It Was" (2022).
Stockhausen: Gesang der Jünglinge Premiered Today in 1956. For a number of scholars, Karlheinz Stockhausen's Gesang der Jünglinge (Song of the Youths) is “the first masterpiece of electronic music.” It was premiered in the large auditorium of Cologne's Westdeutscher Rundfunk on 30 May 1956.
American popstar Miley Cyrus has beaten the record made jointly by Harry Styles' 'As It Was' and Justin Bieber and The Kid LAROI's 'Stay' by becoming the fastest ever artist to reach 1 billion streams on Spotify with her hit 'Flowers'.
1. "Old Town Road" by Lil Nas X featuring Billy Ray Cyrus.