Lady Gaga - a trendsetter for music sales?

It has recently been revealed that Lady Gaga's singles "Poker Face", "Just Dance" & "Bad Romance" have all registered 4 million plus sales in the USA. That's 12 million plus sales in singles from a CD released in 2008; an extraordinary effort in any sense, and for any music generation.

Whilst it is common knowledge that the music-buying public are trending towards mp3 single songs rather than full CDs these days, it makes interesting research to see where Lady Gaga presently sits in single song sales history in the USA.

4 million plus sales are recorded for "Hey Jude" [The Beatles], "Hound Dog" [Elvis Presley] & "I Will Always Love You" [Whitney Houston]. Each song is a classic, to be revered even in 100 years' time.

5 million plus sales are recorded for "I'm Yours" [Jason Mraz], "I Gotta Feeling" [The Black Eyed Peas] & "Low" [Flo-rida]. Each of these songs was released in the last 3 years, confirming the trend of mp3 sales.

Anything above this level is considered an outrider: "We Are The World" [USA For Africa] stands at 8 million plus, and "Candle In The Wind '97" [Elton John] has sold in excess of 11 million single in the USA. In both cases, these songs were released on the back of extraordinary world events occurring, thus they can be excluded from the assessment.

So, what does this information prove?

1. Lady Gaga is an extremely popular entertainer in the present market. It is very difficult to measure her success in comparison to The Beatles or Elvis, albeit all 3 artists have literally exploded to their level of popularity in a very short space of time. History will determine Lady Gaga's staying power.

2. Music sales revenue is now all about single mp3 sales. This is the future, and we need to accept the trend.

In generations to come, we may very well look back at 2010 as the real starting point for the change in retail sales of music. History has shown that it takes an extraordinary event to change the course of history, and we just may have witnessed it...