How 1 record company managed to get rid of a million unsold CDs.
Let's say you were a musician.
You work hard for a year writing and producing (and singing, of course) a new album, and, when you finally release it, buyers rush to the store with their money in hand.
Over 50,000 copies sell on the day of the release, which is doubly impressive because you launched your album only in the U.K. (where, hypothetically, you're from).
Nearly another 100,000 copies sell over the course of the debut week, and the album tops the national charts. Ultimately, the album goes "platinum" many times over, and you sell well over 2 million copies in Europe alone and probably around 5 million worldwide.
That sounds great, right? Right. But for record label EMI, it was, well, not.
The musician whose story is told above isn't a hypothetical person. He's Robbie Williams, one of the U.K.'s most well-known singers.
Robbie Williams performing in New York City in 2003. Photo by Frank Micelotta/Getty Images.
North Americans who can recall 1999 likely remember his only major success in this hemisphere, "Millennium," but if not, listen and watch here. The song topped the U.K. charts and is the only Robbie Williams song to make the Billboard Hot 100 in the United States.
In October 2002, Williams signed a four-album contract with EMI Records which, according to the BBC, earned him an U.K.-record £80 million (or about $125 million), still a record for music contracts in the nation.
The first two albums Williams delivered were unqualified successes; the first, "Escapology," sold over 2 million copies in the U.K. and more than a million more in Germany alone; the second, "Intensive Care," sold an estimated 6.2 million copies worldwide.
But the third album, "Rudebox," didn't do as well.
"Rudebox" came out in 2006, and although it topped out at 5 million, that took nearly a decade — and besides, EMI was expecting to sell about a million more.
And they had already produced that extra million CDs.
For two years, millions of copies of Williams' third album sat idle, unsold and undistributed to retailers.
The CDs were seemingly destined for the landfill, but in 2008, EMI found a buyer — maybe — for the extra inventory: an unnamed Chinese company which wanted every single leftover copy.
But the buyers in China weren't CD stores or, for that matter, interested in Williams' music at all.
The buyers weren't retailers or wholesalers or anything of the sort — they were road builders. Specifically, as reported by Contact Music, EMI crushed the CDs and shipped them to China so that the pulverized discs could be "used in street lighting and road surfacing projects." Apparently, crushed CDs make for good road safety.
Whether EMI made any money on the deal went unreported — its possible that they simply wanted the CDs out of their warehouses and found a company willing to haul them away.
Either way, in some areas of China, the streets aren't quite paved with gold, but they very well might be paved with an album that went platinum.
Dan Lewis runs the popular daily newsletter Now I Know ("Learn Something New Every Day, By Email"). To subscribe to his daily email, click here.
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An Irish woman went to the doctor for a routine eye exam. She left with bright neon green eyes.
It's not easy seeing green.
Did she get superpowers?
Going to the eye doctor can be a hassle and a pain. It's not just the routine issues and inconveniences that come along when making a doctor appointment, but sometimes the various devices being used to check your eyes' health feel invasive and uncomfortable. But at least at the end of the appointment, most of us don't look like we're turning into The Incredible Hulk. That wasn't the case for one Irish woman.
Photographer Margerita B. Wargola was just going in for a routine eye exam at the hospital but ended up leaving with her eyes a shocking, bright neon green.
At the doctor's office, the nurse practitioner was prepping Wargola for a test with a machine that Wargola had experienced before. Before the test started, Wargola presumed the nurse had dropped some saline into her eyes, as they were feeling dry. After she blinked, everything went yellow.
Wargola and the nurse initially panicked. Neither knew what was going on as Wargola suddenly had yellow vision and radioactive-looking green eyes. After the initial shock, both realized the issue: the nurse forgot to ask Wargola to remove her contact lenses before putting contrast drops in her eyes for the exam. Wargola and the nurse quickly removed the lenses from her eyes and washed them thoroughly with saline. Fortunately, Wargola's eyes were unharmed. Unfortunately, her contacts were permanently stained and she didn't bring a spare pair.
- YouTube youtube.com
Since she has poor vision, Wargola was forced to drive herself home after the eye exam wearing the neon-green contact lenses that make her look like a member of the Green Lantern Corps. She couldn't help but laugh at her predicament and recorded a video explaining it all on social media. Since then, her video has sparked a couple Reddit threads and collected a bunch of comments on Instagram:
“But the REAL question is: do you now have X-Ray vision?”
“You can just say you're a superhero.”
“I would make a few stops on the way home just to freak some people out!”
“I would have lived it up! Grab a coffee, do grocery shopping, walk around a shopping center.”
“This one would pair well with that girl who ate something with turmeric with her invisalign on and walked around Paris smiling at people with seemingly BRIGHT YELLOW TEETH.”
“I would save those for fancy special occasions! WOW!”
“Every time I'd stop I'd turn slowly and stare at the person in the car next to me.”
“Keep them. Tell people what to do. They’ll do your bidding.”
In a follow-up Instagram video, Wargola showed her followers that she was safe at home with normal eyes, showing that the damaged contact lenses were so stained that they turned the saline solution in her contacts case into a bright Gatorade yellow. She wasn't mad at the nurse and, in fact, plans on keeping the lenses to wear on St. Patrick's Day or some other special occasion.
While no harm was done and a good laugh was had, it's still best for doctors, nurses, and patients alike to double-check and ask or tell if contact lenses are being worn before each eye test. If not, there might be more than ultra-green eyes to worry about.