As I used to work in the record industry, I’m occasionally interested to see how certain records perform sales wise, regardless of musical merit. It’s a curious fact, of the employed system for measuring a disc’s success, that while “Umbrella” by Rihanna topped the charts for ten weeks, back in the summer of last year, the song was pipped to the post of best-selling single of 2007, at the eleventh hour, by Leona Lewis’s bleeding awful “Bleeding Love”, which only held pole position for a mere seven! In that shorter amount of time, the latter managed to outsell the former quite considerably. In fact, it did so very early on, upon consideration of the week-by-week sales figures. If “Single of the Year” was down to number of weeks as “Top of the Pops”, or even number of weeks on the chart, then Rihanna’s song would’ve won hands down as it has certainly been the more consistent of the pair, regardless of the fact that it was released earlier. It’s still been a golden shower for Rihanna!
