ben-0_0
ATRL Member
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Ray of Light Like A Prayer Erotica Bedtime Stories Music Confessions Confessions II True Blue Like A Virgin Madonna American Life Rebel Heart Hard Candy MDNA Madame X Agree that Confessions has the stronger singles but II is a better album as a whole. Rebel Heart is so overhated for no reason
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This is pure cope lmao. Mariah is the number 1 female artist on the charts, she has more number 1 hits than any other artist excepting The Beatles, and she has multiple 10+ week number 1 hits, at a time when that meant people buying a physical CD in tens of thousands, along with radio domination. A multiple week spanning #1 was a big deal, now all you have to do is fill out the tracklist and get on a few playlists. If anything, you're proving there's more of a monoculture now globally thanks to social media, and still Mariah's overall career success is levels of magnitude higher than Taylor's. To reach Taylor's current chart stats in the 90s, you would have had to spend billions per album to keep her on the charts. The bar has been lowered exponentially and there's just no comparing both artists, Mariah competed in a healthy music industry. Most artists get barely any budget now unless they have a pre-existing fanbase, and there's absolutely no investment in artists. It makes sense that Taylor would dominate in an industry where there's nobody else getting even a fraction of her marketing budget, an increased monoculture thanks to social media, and charts that bring to mind hyperinflation in Germany after WWI. Even Rolling Stone in the 90s was the snobbiest to any pop music, and now Taylor Swift of all artists is plastered all over the homepage
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Who's number 1 rn, 35 years into her career?
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So slightly more reliable than Chartmasters
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If Mariah debuted in 2008 and had her exact same career in the SPS era, it would be upwards of 700 million or something crazy like that. There's no point using figures from Billboard when the system of counting record sales has completely changed to where a play contributes vs someone going out and spending actual money on every album.
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This site is pure sales
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Lmao, well it is? There's more artists and subgenres and communities online, but everyone is getting more or less the same media diet in terms of broader pop culture thanks to social media. It would be different if she were a smaller artist, but her success is more due to the fact she was able to reach the forefront of the media landscape. If anyone else got the coverage and marketing that Taylor Swift gets, it would be the same story - the numbers don't really matter when every single play counts, and the number of variants help inflate that. If she were competing based on her musical output and a more accurate system of counting sales, like in the 90s, she wouldn't rise above Paula Abdul or Amy Grant levels
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No, she just had a rich dad to kickstart her career and rose to the top in a hyper commercialised era where the monoculture in terms of music is far more prominent. Realistically, Taylor was in the right place at the right time and is very savvy with her marketing, but she doesn't make much of an impact when comparing musical legacies and album sales.
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Mariah's record sales are 200 million vs Taylor's 75 million (including variants and SPS). Literally no competition, all of Mariah's hits are still remembered, while Taylor can fill the top 10 and people could barely hum a bar of a number 1 hit. The industry is completely different, and they need to keep it afloat with the SPS numbers, but it puts modern artists in a far lower league than the legends. Again, she'll always have the touring!
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Her marketing budget and the parasocial relationship with fans along with exploitative tactics w/ variants explain why. If Kim Kardashian decided to make music at her popularity peak with the resources Taylor had going in, it would probably be a similar picture - especially with the Kanye production and resources he could bring to a KK music career. And again, comparing Taylor's record sales put her on par with Paula Abdul and artists of that tier, you can't really compare streaming and playlisting where you can rack up millions on passive listens to Mariah's career where it was all based on hard purchases. There's also more of a monoculture now compared to Mariah's peak because there were far more A list artists, where now it's harder to reach those heights without coming from a rich family and a father who can buy your career.
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Recency bias maybe, but overall stats and she clears Taylor
