# Was David Cassidy Really More Popular than Elvis and the Beatles?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-david-cassidy-really-more-popular-than-elvis-and-the-beatles/77131>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [August 20, 2001, 2:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-david-cassidy-really-more-popular-than-elvis-and-the-beatles/77131 "2001-08-20T14:00:05Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 2

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Sunspace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sunspace/32/1250_2.png) [@Sunspace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sunspace)\
**Post date:** [August 22, 2001, 3:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-david-cassidy-really-more-popular-than-elvis-and-the-beatles/77131/21 "2001-08-22T03:32:17Z")

</div>

> [@](#):
>
> _ **astorian** said:_  
> Now, it’s easy to quantify record sales, but hard to quantify the relative popularity of two musical acts from different eras. My guess is, since Americans today have a LOT more free time and a LOT more disposable income than their grandparents did, there are a host of acts that sell more records than Glenn Miller or Tommy Dorsey did- does that mean that, say, Kid Rock is “more popular than Glenn Miller”?

As for ‘most popular’ by sales of recordings, Michael Ventura in Hear That Long Snake Moan mentions an early recording by the ‘Dixieland Jass[sic] Band’ which may have been the most popular recording ever, based on numbers sold versus size of population with players. He mentions sales of _millions_, in the early _1920s_, and states that ‘nearly everyone with a Victrola must have bought one’. But of course the absolute number of sales of that recording would have been long superseded.

[Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-david-cassidy-really-more-popular-than-elvis-and-the-beatles/77131.md?page=1)