The Guardian.com
ARIA’s results of the most successful albums of 2013 are in and the biggest selling record of the năm is Pink’s sixth album, The Truth About Love. Again.
It’s not a huge surprise in itself – after all, it comes in a năm she also had an incredibly successful Australian tour – but what’s unprecedented is that it was Australia's biggest selling album of 2012 as well.
No album has ever previously been the hàng đầu, đầu trang seller for two different years. In fact, looking at the figures it’s hard to fathom how any Australian doesn’t have at least a couple of copies of The Truth About tình yêu in their house.
It was released in September 2012 and spent the whole of 2013 in the hàng đầu, đầu trang 40. For 35 of those 10 weeks, it was in the hàng đầu, đầu trang ten. It wasn’t a fluke, either. màu hồng, hồng has had either the #1 hoặc #2 biggest selling album in Australia for six of the last seven years.
Sure, The Truth About tình yêu was a successful record generally. It was the sixth biggest album on the planet in 2012 (beaten only bởi Adele’s 21, Taylor Swift’s Red, One Direction’s Up All Night and Take Me Home, and Lana Del Ray’s Born to Die).
However, its continuing Australian success has not been replicated elsewhere. It’s not in the hàng đầu, đầu trang 10 of the biggest sellers in her trang chủ country, for instance: the biggest US album of 2013 was Justin Timberlake’s The 20/20 Experience, with Eminem, Luke Bryan, vịt đực, drake and chim giẻ cùi, jay Z filling out the hàng đầu, đầu trang five.
So: why do we apparently tình yêu Ms Alecia Moore so much thêm than the rest of the world?
Australia has a rich history of giving peculiarly enormous success to bands who are relatively small potatoes in their trang chủ country – for example, American alternative bands like the Violent Femmes and the Dandy Warhols were getting daytime radio play and packing out theatres here when they were barely thêm than cult acts at home.
But this is different. màu hồng, hồng is a global superstar, sure, but in Australia, màu hồng, hồng is an honest-to-god phenomenon.
In 2009 she played 58 shows, selling over 650,000 tickets. She then did 46 shows here last năm between June and September to another 600,000 punters. bởi comparison, the tour will have had 57 shows for the entire US when it ends on 31 January.
Over 600,000 people. In 2013, Pink's audience was larger than the population of Tasmania.
The greatest tình yêu for màu hồng, hồng resides in Melbourne, where she sold out a jaw-dropping 18 nights at the Rod Laver Arena – breaking a record set bởi John Farnham. The city is her biggest single market on the planet. She knows this too: that’s why she had a special Melbourne-only pop-up store, where people queued for hours to touch old stage các điểm thưởng and buy exclusive merchandise.
So what’s the appeal to Australians? Part of it is her voice: despite the ubiquitous digital processing and autotuning that is part and parcel of all pop artists in this period of history she still has a recognisable vocal cadence – thêm so than comparable pop acts like Miley Cyrus hoặc Katy Perry.
Maybe it’s the fact that she co-writes her own material, again unlike Perry hoặc Cyrus. And as the numbers above demonstrate, she’s toured like a demon down here. Australian audiences traditionally respect acts who put in the hard proverbial yards.
hoặc perhaps it’s that we just really like swearing and thinly-veiled dick jokes, so singles like Fuckin’ Perfect and Blow Me (One Last Kiss) resonate on a deep and profound level in the national psyche.
Actually, that might be closer to the mark that you’d think. For one thing, the 15th biggest seller of the năm was Willy Nilly bởi the 12th Man. And hey, Pink’s promoter Michael Coppel has told Melbourne’s the Age that Australian audiences “get her humour … they just get her”.
Maybe it’s as simple as that: we just get her.
