Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born in 1756 and died in 1791, making this year the 225th anniversary of his death. Yet he sold more CDs this year than any other recording artist, according to Billboard, which keeps a tally of CDs sold.
The magazine, which tracks the top artists across several genres, cited Universal Music Group as saying one of Mozart’s newly released box sets represented “the fruit of years of scholarship, planning, and curation.”
Technically, the count includes every single CD sold, and one compilation of Mozart’s work, a box set entitled Mozart 225, contains 200 discs.
Many music bloggers have pointed out that the 1.25 million CDs sold of this one box set, then, amounted to just about 6,000 customers who shelled out $500 apiece for the collection. I just can’t imagine Beyoné’s or Kanye’s or Taylor’s fans paying that much for a CD collection.
The set was released at the end of October, and the chart-topping sales figure reflects not a sudden interest in classical music but an artifact of the counting method used by Billboard. You can also look at this in the light of another counting system we use: Donald Trump received about 2.9 million votes fewer than Hillary Clinton in the presidential race but was elected president because of the way we count votes in the US.
Furthermore, the typical way to purchase music in the digital age, known as streaming, often involves subscribing to a streaming service for about $10 a month and not purchasing individual copies of CDs. This artificially reduces the count for all the CDs you stream.
On the other hand, people who bought the Mozart 225 box set are likely to be Mozart enthusiasts and would prefer to have a physical copy of the music, rather than a stream.
That is, they are likely to listen to the music not so much while they’re on the go but when they’re enjoying a quiet evening at home—with a set of speakers designed for true audiophiles, not through earbuds. That’s not really how most people use the $10-a-month streaming buffets.
