Music

Music Facts :

1. The harmonica is the world’s best-selling music instrument.

2. Music can help reduce chronic pain by more than 20% and can alleviate depression by up to 25%.

3. Termites eat wood twice as fast when listening to heavy metal music.

4. Jimi Hendrix’s tombstone has a Fender Stratocaster carved on it.

5. The smallest guitar in the world is 10 micrometres long with strings 50 nanometres (100 atoms) wide.

6. Yamaha, established in 1887 was the first piano manfacturer in Japan.

7. To win a gold disc, an album needs to sell 100,000 copies in Britain, and 500,000 in the United States.

8. The CD was developed by Philips and Sony in 1980.

9. 40 billion songs are downloaded illegally every year, that’s some 90% of all music downloads.

10. The music industry generates about $4 billion in online music but loose about $40 billion to illegal downloads.

11. The number of recorded CDs and blank CDs sold were about equal.

12. Ireland has won the most Eurovision song contests (7 times).

13. Annie Lennox holds the record for the most Brit awards (8).

14. The Beatles holds the top spot of album sales in the US (106 million), followed by Garth Brooks second (92 million), Led Zeppelin (83 million), Elvis Presley (77 million), and the Eagles (65 million). Worldwide The Beatles sold more than 1 billion records.

15. The last note of a keyboard is C.

16. The British, the highest per capita spenders on music, buy 7,2% of the world music market.

17. The US share of the world music market is 31.3%.

18. Global sales of pre-recorded music total more than $40 billion.

19. The top selling singles of all time are Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind ‘97″, at 33 million, Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas”, 30 million, and Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock”, 25 million.

20. The top selling singles of all time are Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind ‘97″, at 33 million, Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas”, 30 million, and Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock”, 25 million.

21. DVD discs are the same diameter (120mm) and thickness (1.2mm) as a Compact Disc (CD) but a DVD can store 13 times or more data.

22. Music can trigger a release of endorphins -’feel good’ chemicals which occur naturally in the brain.

23. A study showed that listening to relaxing music for an hour has the same effect as getting an hour long massage!

24. The largest musical instrument in the world is the organ in the Municipal Auditorium, in Atlantic City.       Designed by U.S. senator Emerson L. Richards and completed in 1930, the organ has 33,112 pipes ranging in length from 6 millimetres to 19.4 metres.

25. Whistles and flutes around 25,000 years old have been found at Upper Paleolithic sites of the Aurignacian Period.

26. Jimi Hendrix,Janis Joplin,Jim Morrison,Brian Jones,Kurt Cobain,and Amy Winehouse all died at age 27.

27. Although music can be hard to define, it is often described as a pleasing or meaningful arrangement of sounds.



The most consecutive weeks at the top of the Official Singles Chart:

- Bryan Adams - (Everything I do) I do it for you (16 weeks) - (1991)
- Wet Wet Wet - Love is all around (15 weeks) - (1994)
- Slim Whitman - Rose Marie (11 weeks) - (1955)
- Whitney Houston - I will always love you (10 weeks) - (1992)
- David Whitfield - Cara Mia (10 weeks) - (1954)