I don't know about Sampson and Brian, but for me the categories are "initial popularity" and "Lasting Popularity" as opposed to "Commercial Impact."

In commercial impact, if you are actually just talking about who created the most money, then an artist who wrote his own hit songs would be creating a lot more money than another artist who just performed hit songs written by others.

Then there's also, who made the money. If the artist had a bad deal and never got paid much from their record company (Tommy James), does he do worse in commercial impact than somebody who had a better business deal?

How about publishing?

Modern artists who publish their own songs end up making more money on hits than artists from the past who were clueless about how publishing worked.

If the artist signs a huge deal to endorse a product, is that commercial impact?

People who go to concerts regulary are a relatively small portion of overall music consumers, just as people who go out to clubs to drink and dance are also just a small portion of music fans.

When you're in those worlds, like I was as a DJ for many years, you can get the impression that certain records are humongous. For instance, there was no rock record anywhere near as popular as "What I Like About You" by the Romantics in the early to late 1980s as far as I was concerned. I had to play that every night for many years, and it was almost always the biggest rock record of the night in terms of crowd reaction. I couldn't understand how Brain could only have it as #21 of 1979. But the thing is, only a small portion of music consumers are out in clubs dancing, and the same analogy applies with concerts. If you went by concert numbers you'd think that the Dave Matthews Band was the most popular musical act around, but they've never even had a top ten hit here. Jimmy Buffett only had one top ten hit.

You hear about people all the time who have seen Springsteen dozens of times, or even hundreds of times.

So here's the question.

Do we go strictly by dollars, or do we go by number of people who like an artist's music?

If one guy goes to see Springsteen in all 12 of his Meadowlands shows during a three week period, do we just take the $1500 he spent on tickets and put that towards Bruce's "commercial impact?"

What about the parking fees collected by the arena?

Suppose the artist starts his own line of clothing or perfume or something and it makes tons of money. Is that "commercial impact."

The Beach Boys filled stadiums in the 70s.

N Sync filled stadiums on their last tour.

I think the demographics of the audience has more to do with it than the style of music.

Another thing about concert attendance is that it's heavily affected by era. Awhile back, gminer posted a list of the 30 highest attended concerts in the US. There were only 2 pre-1981 entries on the list, and those 2 entries were from 1976 and 1977 and were at #25 and #28 on the list.

Bruce,
For me, the term Commercial Impact was just so it fit in with the other two impact areas of the criteria, Musical and Cultural. Symmetry, that's all. It always meant how their records did at the time of release, or if a record re-charted.

I think having the term describe what it is measuring is much more important than any symmetry.

You should change it to "chart performance" if that's what it actually is.

I guess you have O.C.D. Why else would symmetry mean anything here?

No wonder your criteria is "four parts weighed equally." Your OCD has forced you to always make everything symmetric.

What I was thinking on Otis was that he was highly respected, had a lot of top 10 R&B hits, mostly during the era before R&B crossed over to the pop charts, and he's very influential, #24 on Sampson's influential atists list. So he looks like a top 100 to me as a performer alone. I have reservations about the non-performer accomplishments. Carole King's placement in the 2nd 100 was brought up a couple weeks ago. That placement is based on her accomplishments as a performer. If she were also credited with all the songs she wrote before the '70s for other artists, she would be a lot higher.

Is Smokey Robinson credited for all the songs he wrote for other artists?

Really? This coming from the same person who, over the years, has systematically attempted to include every possible advantage into already established criteria that would help a single band that you worship? Sorry, not buying it. If you are suggesting that you'd be just as vociferous about somehow including concert ticket sales if the Who drew as many fans as the Grass Roots then you're a liar. Every single quote you dredge up is to improve the Who's standing. Every single reference you use benefits the Who. Now you're saying you're fair and objective? No way. You killed your own credibility regarding the Who long ago. I even told you that you were doing it and that it'd be to your advantage if you stopped talking about them entirely, but you can't help yourself. Anytime you sense their status being threatened you lash out.

But as for the context of things. That is the single most important thing in ranking ANYTHING. If you were to rank baseball players by sheer career statistics and NOT take into account the era they played in, as well as the ballpark conditions, opposition, etc. you'd have a faulty list. If you ranked Greatest Presidents and had the relatively calm two-terms of Dwight Eisenhower ranked higher than Abraham Lincoln, who presided over a Civil War, because you couldn't care less about the context in which the two men did their jobs, you'd be an idiot. Of course context matters. It matters more than anything else because 1948 and 2012 are not the same. In 1965 hit singles stayed on the charts just about ten weeks because every major artist was releasing newly written and recorded songs about every eight to ten weeks, radio played songs from ALL styles of rock, meaning there was far more diverse competition for airplay and always newer songs coming out to claim another spot in the playlist, and because touring was not done the same way as it is now, so the emphasis on recording was greater. By contrast, decades later, artists were releasing new material far less often, trying to maximize album sales rather than sell singles, touring for a year or two on the back of it to reap more money, thus staying out of the studio for that entire time, and radio had split into demographic based formats allowing hit songs to stay on the charts much, much longer because alternative songs were ONLY competing with other alternative songs for space on alternative-based radio, and hard-rock songs were vying for airtime only with other hard-rock songs. But if you want to delusionally pretend these things don't matter, and all things are equal, then Satisfaction (#1 for 4 weeks, charted for just 14) gets crushed in Commercial Impact by Flo Rida's "Low", which charted for forty weeks, including ten at #1. Yeah, that wouldn't be TOO controversial.

Overall in terms of context, race plays only one part in it, amidst a myriad of other, equally important, aspects that have to be taken into consideration. Independent record labels in America in the 60's did not waste money releasing records in Great Britain because they didn't have enough cash (or reliable collection methods overseas) to be able to afford it. A record can't very well become a hit if it's unavailable in a country. That's a business reality, not racial. Certain popular white styles of rock do not get played on radio often because there's no format for them. That's not racial either, but it absolutely has to be taken into account, otherwise you're ignoring the reality of the situation. The Kinks were banned from America for a few years, yet were popular in the U.S. before that as well as after it. To not take that into consideration would be insane. But so too would claiming that concert ticket sales are, in of themselves, reliable measures of the supreme popularity of all artists equally, even though there are decades of professionally compiled studies showing that it unquestionably benefit only certain eras, styles and demographics.

Every artist can only deal with the circumstances of their time. Singles-era artists had different commercial benchmarks than album-era artists, one nighters on the chitlin circuit is a different reality than corporate driven world tours, exposure on TV or the movies in 1954 is not the same as exposure in 1984 when MTV ruled. Everything changes and to ignore those changes is to re-write history to suit only a specific perspective. That's why you need to put everything in context. It determines simply how well every artist did in relation to their own time and stylistic expectations, whether they fell short of the accepted standards, met those standards or far surpassed them. After all, the ultimate goal is to be as accurate as possible and for the rankings to be truly reflective of what someone actually did, not someone's interpretation of what they did based on faulty logic and historical ignorance.

Not under popularity, but because he wrote those songs at he same time that he was a performer, maybe he should under musical impact. I'd be interested in Sampson's take on that.

Carole King was a performer already in the late 50s and early 60s. Maybe not a real successful performer, but a performer nonetheless.

Here's her first single, from 1958:

lol

What's so funny?

It's likely true. Johnny was a singer, musician, producer, songwriter, band leader, promoter, DJ, club owner, record label owner, and probably a few other things that I'm forgetting (TV Host). He did virtually everything you could do in the business.

I've been listening to this one that he wrote lately. The original version of "So Fine" by the Sheiks (featuring Jesse Belvin). I'm starting to like it better than the hit version by the Fiestas.

Something stuck in your throat Machine Head? Spit it out.

Or find me another artist who successfully did the following: Write hit songs for himself and others; independently produce records for other labels and artists; perform on record as both an instrumentalist backing others, and as a frontman under his own name; owned his own label and publishing company, signing talent, organizing sessions, contracting studios and distributing records; acted as an independent talent scout who discovered a half dozen R&R HOF'ers; was a popular radio DJ and television host; owned and operated one of the most successful clubs in Los Angeles (the first in the country to feature R&R as its house entertainment); spearheaded the first artist-oriented national tours in rock and even drove the damn bus for it at times... oh yeah, he also was one of the guys who actually INVENTED rock 'n' roll to begin with in the late 40's.

That's only the music side. He also ran for public office, wrote multiple books, became an ordained minister who oversaw a thriving church for a over decade, ran a successful organic food company that sold the products he himself grew, and was a serious and well-respected artist whose sculptures and paintings have been exhibited around the world.

Yeah, find me three other artists in rock history combined who can match that diverse resume.

ROFL !!!!

Okay, here's that first Clovers record. Diane just put it on Youtube and the flip side was there already: