Velvet Correlation

The Velvet Underground’s first album in 1967 was massively influential. An apocryphal quote: “The album may have only sold [x] copies, but everyone who bought it started a band.”

However, there is great variation on the value of x. Mother Jones reporter @daudig collected a number of the quotes, and the figure varies wildly.

More in @daudig‘s feed. Since he was too lazy to Storify them all, I decided to collect the data in a handy chart:

Sorting these by year shows an interesting deflation of Brian Eno’s original 1982 quote of 30,000, followed by a rapid inflation:

Thus concludes this infographical tribute to Lou Reed, who will soon spawn ONE MILLION BANDS.