‘Crazy’: The first song to hit number one without selling a single copy
In February 2006, Orson’s indie pop sort-of-classic ‘No Tomorrow’ became the lowest-selling single to reach the number one spot in the UK music charts. However, this wasn’t quite the ‘front page on a slow news day’ achievement that it might have seemed. What it actually hinted at was a shift in the music industry towards the internet.
Sadly for Orson, their sales suffered due to pirating, and the charts were also adjusting their practices to incorporate the rise of downloads. This transition meant that only a few months later, a mysterious duo by the strange name of Gnarls Barkley were able to go viral, so to speak, and hit the top spot on the charts with their enormously catchy single ‘Crazy’ without selling a single physical copy of the record.
This had huge reverberations within the industry. It showed cautious labels that, indeed, the internet was the future even for music. Suddenly, marketing had to be rethought. I even remember personally thinking that me and my friend Greg had launched Gnarls Barkley by being the first people to discover them after hearing the track’s first BBC Radio broadcast and adding it as our MySpace profile songs immediately.
This was, in fact, a strange proto-paradigm of how music would soon move forward. Now, that’s how a lot of tracks boom; kids catch hold of something, it snowballs, and suddenly algorithms serve it to similar kids, rendering it a monster hit.
Now, it is even possible for a song to reach number one without selling a single physical or virtual copy by virtue of streaming data alone. Plays on Spotify, YouTube and the likes have been incorporated in the charts since 2014. In 2015, Justin Bieber’s ‘What Do You Mean’ might have only shifted around 30,000 copies, but it smashed the charts thanks to a further 36,000 ‘points’ equated from 3.6 million streams.
However, when it comes to ‘Crazy’, it is also important not to let its pivotal position in history detract from its inherent brilliance. It was always destined to be a hit. In fact, Downtown Records A&R man Josh Deutsch signed Gnarls Barkley after one single listen of the song. Inspired by the works of Ennio Morricone, the bass dramatically wove the track into the minds of the masses with an aura of soul coolness.
And, like many massive hits, it arose seamlessly without much thought out of a passing chat between its creators, Cee Lo Green and Danger Mouse. As Danger Mouse told the New York Times: “I somehow got off on this tangent about how people won’t take an artist seriously unless they’re insane… So we started jokingly discussing ways in which we could make people think we were crazy… CeeLo took that conversation and made it into ‘Crazy’, which we recorded in one take.”
