Mariah Carey bags 18th career number one
The King will always be The King, but two of his biggest achievements have this week been surpassed.
Elvis, scorer of 17 number one hit singles on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart, was second only to The Beatles' record of 20. This week, Mariah Carey's new single "Touch My Body", the first taken from her forthcoming album, "E=MC2", became her 18th career number one, surpassing Elvis and putting her firmly in second place, just two behind The Beatles.
"I'm just feeling really happy and grateful," 38-year-Carey told the Associated Press.
"I really can never put myself in the category of people who have not only revolutionised music but also changed the world, that's a completely different era and time," she said.
Presley was also this week surpassed as the artist with the most top-10 hits in the rock era, as Madonna moved ahead with her latest single, "4 Minutes", now the star's 37th top-10 entry.
Though music studios continue to decry digital distribution, and often cite the medium as a cause for reduced sales, Carey's "Touch My Body" soared to the top of charts with the aid of mammoth download sales. In its first week of release, the single gathered some 286,000 downloads.
Madonna's "4 Minutes" also achieved impressive first week download sales of 217,000. Such numbers beg the question; what kind of sales would Elvis have achieved had his music been so readily available and easily accessible?
