The "Least favourite Beatles song" -thread got me thinking about something that repeatedly pops into my mind.
 
Every now and then the success and sales figures of a pop/rock artist is defined by "More/better than the Beatles".
I would like to see an estimation comparing the number of record players in households to the number of sold records, and a comparison to the real value of the sales (regarding peoples incomes).
This digistreaming time has changed the picture too much to make a reasonable comparison to present times, of course.
But it would be interesting to know how many records per record player/CD player the Beatles sold in Europe and North America in the 60's and the same regarding the best seller in the 80's or 90's. Also, the real price of the records should be taken into account.
In the late 60's in Finland an album costed more than an industrial or office worker earned in a day.
 
In Europe at least, in the early 60's not all households had a record player (most did), and when there was one, it was usually in the living room and the kids couldn't use it when and how loud they wanted. In the 80's people had much more possibilities
to listen to their favourite music.
 

Very good points

Excellent point. 
 
Back in Quebec, Canada, growing up in the 80's, a LP/cassette costed me between $12 and $15. IIRC, that was 2 or 3 hours of work. A single was $3. 
 
My paper run didn't raise enough weekly to buy an album. Hence, music was very precious.
 
Even a blank tape cost between $3 and $5 - remember those fancy Chromium Dioxide 90 Minute tapes? That's right - even copied music wasn't really "free"!  You had to invest money and time to copy it, often for a poor copy. 
 
First CD's I bought were $18-20.
 
Personally, I could listen to vinyls in the living room - and only at certain times - i.e. when parents weren't there. If you were lucky, you had some sort of tape player in your room. 
 
30 years later, the price of music has actually decreased. People can listen to music wherever they want.  And, overall, music, like everything else, has lost all its value.
 

And now we can listen to songs in the songs forum by daryl1968, jamesg1213, The Forum Monkeys and Beagle/Beepster/Bapu as well as music by The Sanchez Brothers for FREE!!!!

bapu
And now we can listen to songs in the songs forum by daryl1968, jamesg1213, The Forum Monkeys and Beagle/Beepster/Bapu as well as music by The Sanchez Brothers for FREE!!!!

Why are you over-charging??? 

Kalle Rantaaho
... 
In Europe at least, in the early 60's not all households had a record player (most did), and when there was one, it was usually in the living room and the kids couldn't use it when and how loud they wanted. In the 80's people had much more possibilities to listen to their favourite music.
 

 
The LP player was EXCLUSIVE to classical music! We did play our Ray Charles, Gilbert Becaud and Edith Piaf albums ... but it was an excuse to slip in a Beatles single, or Rolling Stones, or maria Betania or Roberto Carlos ... we turned the volume down ... but I can tell you that at 15 I knew the difference between Maria Callas and Renata Tebaldi, and Puccini and Wagner. Oh wait ... we played "West Side Story" because it was Leonard Bernstein ... and we had his famous album with Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky on it! (Good one too!)
 
This was about 1963/1964 and 1965 in Brazil!
 
Can't say that about rock music these days, can we? It would sound weird and some folks would think that you are being this or that!

Between 1963 and '65 I was working on making content suitable for the FSF.

craigb
Between 1963 and '65 I was working on making content suitable for the FSF.

Musically, it was an interesting time. Becaud, Piaf, Charles and Belafonte, were fine ... but none had the excitement and explosion of the senses that "West Side Story" had, which was, for all intents and purposes, an "anti-musical", in that the music was actually done by a classical musician, instead of the usual jingle and song dance thing that was "musicals" (and still is!!!) and its definition.
 
I always thought that WSS was actually more influenced by opera and its interplay of character, than a musical usually was, whose stories were not even important to the sequence of songs, and it was all, just like early burlesque ... a new set of lines sets up the next song. WSS had a solid story at least.
 
I did not see, until later, on a college course (I majored in directing for theater and film), on musicals, that I got to see the most insane musical ever done ... 7 Brides for 7 Brothers ... where the choreography defies description, and you would think that this was a true psychedelic experience in insanity ... and funny, too! By that time, 15 years later, WSS was not that important for me, but it still was nice music.
 
So, you can see how a lot of the music I like sometimes has to be more than just a "song" ... even though I am surrealistic enough that a song out of nowhere in the middle of nowhere, makes more sense than anything else these days!
 
I do not remember the price of the singles for Roberto Carlos, Beatles and Maria Betania ... in cruzeiros, the Brazilian currency, and its relative value in dollars at the time ... and I have no idea, although I probably could search that out in the net today ... I bet!