Which band is mathematically the greatest of all time?
Nerdy_Demon After reading through tons of comments on this list, I haven't seen a lot of people who use actual facts and statistics to make a claim that a certain band is better than all others. I thought to myself, "How DO these bands really stack up?". So I decided to grab my calculator, open Google and start doing some math. And after two weeks of research, math, mistakes, failures, and suffering, I have found the answers. (It was worth it). How should the top 50 bands on this list really be ranked?Before I begin, firstly, please note that this will definitely not be 100% accurate, and these stats were my own research and math skills put together. Second, the band The Jimi Hendrix Experience was a curveball. I kept getting results about Jimi Hendrix himself, and my final results were flawed. I will be excluding them from the lists and the final rankings. Third, please note that this post was not intended to prove that one band is better or worse than another, and I do not mean to offend any fans of certain artists. So let's begin, now that that's out of the way.
The first statistic I went off of was Grammys. Grammys are musical awards given to bands or artists for an outstanding musical achievement. They are, for the most part, very reliable in telling which bands have the most "talent". I was unsure of how to fairly rank the bands. I could rank them on how many awards they received, but I think fairer than that would be to rank them based on how many nominations they received. So for the first list, I ranked them on how many Grammy award nominations the bands have received. It turns out U2 is number one with 48 nominations, The Beatles at a close second with 40, and Coldplay in third with 29.
The second statistic I used was album sales. But it's not that simple. I wasn't satisfied just going off of album sales. To make it fairer, I found how many albums each band had sold worldwide (Except the ones listed below), and divided it by the number of studio albums, live albums, and Extended Plays (EP's) the band had made. The reason for this is that I wanted the average of how "popular" the bands were over time. I didn't want it to be biased towards bands with tons of horrible albums and one hit album. A band that makes one hundred horrible albums that each sell half a million copies is considered worse than a band that makes one album which sells 30 million. But the band with a hundred horrible albums still sells more copies, and therefore, would be put first. So after a ton of research and math, I found that The Eagles actually topped the list, with (to my surprise) Avenged Sevenfold at a close second. Pink Floyd, way behind both, came in third.
Bands which I could not find the number of albums sold worldwide- (If someone could comment and tell me if they find it, then that would be really awesome.)
-The Jimi Hendrix Experience- I couldn't find how many albums in total the band (or Jimi Hendrix himself) have sold.
-Three Days Grace-Skillet
-Breaking Benjamin
-Rise Against
-Evanescence
-Hollywood Undead
-Tool
The third and final statistic I used to determine the best band of all time was Google Trends. For those of you who don't know, Google Trends is a website created by Google (obviously) that tracks the popularity of certain search terms or topics. It was only created in 2004, so it has only been tracking since then. It has a convenient feature that lets you compare up to 5 topics/search terms side by side. There was only one problem. Comparing them to each other gives you an average popularity for the topic, but the average is compared to the other topic. But you can only get an average if you compare it to something else. So I had to choose something to use as the "other thing". So I chose Thirty Seconds To Mars. (Hey, I went to all the pain and suffering to make this, so just go along with it). Numbers one, two, and three were Aerosmith, Queen, and Kiss, respectively.
Finally, to get the final rankings, I added up each band's number (1-50) on each list and divided it by the number of lists they appeared in to get an average placing. This number determined their spot on the final list. The smaller the number, the higher up the list they are. Please use this link to reach the page with the final list, as well as all of the other lists I used in the process:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xHecjU4kqUrUi_dL98MvgpHndevXOVDd0Vc8qfW6mH8/edit