Garth's Good List

Media Moment: Garth Brooks on CMT
Queen Related: Garth mentions Queen

It’s no secret that Garth Brooks has been quoted as saying that seeing Queen in concert as a kid had a tremendous impact on him as a performer. (Mind you, he said the same thing about Kiss, didn't he?)

Country Music Television aired a 2006 biography on him today and he again listed Queen as one of his early favorites and still plays them around the house.

In the CMT program, there is a clip from 1994 that shows him fielding questions during a radio call-in program and he included Queen in his list of music he likes:

“You can name it from Peter, Paul and Mary to Janis Joplin; down to Queen, Boston, Journey, Styx . . . I picked up George Strait in 1980 and haven’t put him down yet. We have a saying in our house that there's two kinds of music . . . it’s good or bad.”

Also in the CMT program is Brooks’ album sales listed at “115 million, which puts him third highest in the world behind The Beatles and Elvis.” I would like to know where that 2006 figure came from as record sales figures for Queen have been reported as high as 300 million, in my experience.

Calculating total record sales is tricky because there is no industry standard for determining worldwide gold, platinum or diamond status sales (e.g., is it a million units or a million dollars’ worth?). Even a quick check on Wikipedia’s list of top selling artists yields some surprises.

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