Just recently, rapper Kanye West released a new track entitled “Only One”, which features legendary musician Sir Paul McCartney of The Beatles. While that news may seem slightly odd, it’s not surprising nor is it strange to see musicians collaborate with each other. Sometimes that’s the best way to see horizons expand and new and wonderful music come about. Let’s all just collectively ignore Lulu, okay?
Now, while it may not be surprising it was definitely incredibly depressing and upsetting to see the multitude of Kanye West fans who had no idea who McCartney was. Whether or not you like The Beatles it’s impossible to deny just how important and influential their music was and has been on pretty much every genre since they began releasing albums.
Case and point: The Beatles were part of “Our World”, the first ever internationally televised satellite TV broadcast, where they performed “All You Need Is Love”, specifically written for that program. Their appearance on this program drew in an audience of approximately 400 million viewers.
Let’s put things into perspective, shall we? The global population in 1967 was just under 3.5 billion compared to 2014’s 7.2+ billion. Today, that would be approximately 820 million people all watching the same program at the same time. This number is beaten pretty much only by Olympics and World Cup events.
It’s rather staggering to think that such an event drew so many people in from all corners of the world. Below is a video that shows the entire broadcast, and you can watch their segment starting at 1:17:33.
Coming back to Kanye West, let’s do a little bit of math: He has sold over 21 million albums, 66 million digital downloads, has 11.1 million followers on Twitter, and 14.1 million people “Like” West’s Topic page on Facebook. That adds up to 112.2 million. Does this number mean anything? No, not at all.
But it’s not 400 million.