The Numbers of Wikipedia

The history of journalism when it comes to pop and rock music is riddled with sloppiness, with writers who have often relied solely on their own personal experience, relegating the historical, social and artistic context of the records under review to a mere curiosity, if not openly distorting it to fit their own narrative.

Nothing, however, has been manipulated more than sales figures: for some reason, many journalists — and consequently many fans, who have been influenced by them — have convinced themselves that the more an artist sold, the more reason there was to consider them memorable (it's no coincidence that the best-selling band of all time, the Beatles, is also considered the greatest).

This has led, following the aforementioned principle of bending facts to fit one's own narrative, to inflating sales figures as much as possible, in order to boost the standing of whichever artist one wished to praise at that particular moment: after that, since these writings were regarded as authoritative, they were picked up by others, and an inflated figure that had no basis in reality spread like wildfire — one that everyone became convinced of, and very often still are to this day.

Indeed, the same thing works in reverse too, depending on what one is trying to prove: the most hardcore fans of alternative music like to claim that the first album by Velvet Underground was a spectacular flop, going so far as to reduce its sales to a mere hundred copies, when in reality the record sold enough to stay on the Billboard Top 200 for 13 weeks, even if only in the lower reaches.

If this phenomenon was widespread in the pre-Internet era, it has since become truly rampant. It pains us to say it, but from the 2000s onward, a fair share of the blame falls on Wikipedia, which is an extraordinary resource in many respects and is by no means meant to be disparaged wholesale, but which has at the same time allowed some of these myths to spread, sometimes through a particularly comical cyclical mechanism: someone inserts the wrong sales figure on artist "X"'s Wikipedia page, without having any credible sources for it; a journalist writes an article about that artist, looks it up on Wikipedia, finds the figure in question and publishes it on their own site (or perhaps reports it on the radio, or even on television, without citing the source, of course); some time later, that journalist's article is added to Wikipedia as the source for the aforementioned incorrect figure. There are numerous cases of these self-perpetuating myths.

Over time, the English-language version of Wikipedia has tried to curb this phenomenon, and today the situation is more manageable than the wild west of a few years ago, though one must always remain vigilant, while unfortunately — in splendid representation of the slapdash approach that must always characterize at least part of our culture — the Italian version still reports such a series of absurdities as to make one tear one's hair out.

This article is dedicated to what is perhaps the single most amusing myth of all, namely the supposed four million copies sold by Claudio Baglioni with the album "La vita è adesso" (1985) alone. Over the coming weeks, two further in-depth pieces will be published, one on the Italian market more generally and one on the international market.

"La vita è adesso" was, in every respect, an album of enormous success, staying at number 1 on the Tv Sorrisi e Canzoni chart for 27 weeks (an all-time record), on the Rai chart for 21 weeks, and on the Musica & Dischi chart for 19 weeks: whichever of the three one prefers, it stands as the absolute dominator of the Italian charts in 1985.

However, not even such a show of strength could have generated four million copies, a figure that was simply beyond the reach of the Italian market, where no record has ever managed to reach even two million copies within a couple of years of its first chart entry.

And yet the figure is stated with great confidence on Wikipedia, backed up by a long list of writings on the subject, among which are:

– an article on Sprea.it accessible only via subscription; 

– an article on Tuttonotizie that cites four million 500,000 copies, without any source; 

– a description of the CD on the Discoteca Laziale website, copied word for word from Wikipedia (regarding the circular-reference hoaxes mentioned earlier);

– an article by Fanpage that cites sales of four million 400,000 copies, without any source;

– an article by Tv Sorrisi e Canzoni that doesn't even mention the album's sales figures; 

– an article on La Stampa that speaks of "almost" four million copies and "a thousand-thousand weeks" (sic) at number 1, without citing any sources;

– an article by Sky Tg24 that finally cites the most plausible figure, namely a million and a half copies, so it's unclear why it would be used as a source for a claim reporting an entirely different number.

What's worse is that all of these sources are cited in support of a claim found on the Wikipedia page of Fimi (the Italian Music Industry Federation), according to which the association itself certified the album as the best-selling of all time on the Italian market: too bad none of the sources in question actually mention Fimi, and Fimi has never made any such statement about the album (or at least, none can be found on its official website).

Further down the same Fimi Wikipedia page, the full list of best-selling albums of all time in Italy is given, and the sales figure for "La vita è adesso" grows to four and a half million (asking for consistency between the figures within the same article is apparently too much to ask), and among the sources, in addition to those already mentioned, are added the websites Mauxa.com (now defunct, and which incidentally didn't even mention the number of copies sold in its own article) and Hitparades.it (which reports two million 600,000 copies, rather than four and a half million), as well as the book "Discografia Illustrata. Claudio Baglioni", published in 2008 by Coniglio Editore: there was no way to check it, but even if it were accurate, Coniglio Editore has no authority whatsoever over how many copies any given record has sold on Italian soil.

Returning briefly to La Stampa, another one of its articles speaks of three million 800,000 copies (at least it's consistent with the "almost" four million cited in the other piece) and claims the figure was calculated by Siae. However, a search online turns up no official statement, or even one published by remotely authoritative sources, on the matter.

The oldest article traceable regarding this supposed Siae statement belongs to the blog FanCity Acireale (January 2015), which probably served as the source for the others and which it's hard to see how anyone could consider reliable. The very same list had, incidentally, already appeared a couple of months earlier on the blog of musician Antonio Bacciocchi, TonyFace, though without any mention of Siae.

We won't go any further, because digging deeper risks never ending (there's someone who puts the album above five million, someone else above five and a half, and at this rate it'll only be a matter of years before it hits ten), but through all of this one has to wonder: what is Claudio Baglioni's official position, or at least that of his management, on the matter?

On his official website, in the "Bio" section, it states that "La vita è adesso" has sold over a million and a half copies. Baglioni and those around him would obviously have every interest in backing the four-million story if it were true, but the point is that, for the Italian market, that's such an unrealistic number it's almost laughable once you understand how the industry actually works. A million and a half, on the other hand, is an entirely credible figure, and one that lines up with the album's chart performance when compared to other bestsellers of the era; and let's be clear: it's still an impressive achievement, since it was in all likelihood the first Italian album to reach that mark (it's not official, but it can be assumed considering that the most impressive chart performance in the years immediately prior had been that of "His Master's Voice" by Franco Battiato, up to that point the only album to top one million copies on the Italian market), even though it was later overtaken, as we'll see in the next article.

The brightest prize, however, goes to Fabio Volo, who went and flaunted the bogus figure as a guest on Fabio Fazio's show, during a nostalgic moment about the Eighties, likely giving a strong boost to its spread. Unfortunately, the video is not available to stream.

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