Destroying Myths: related to Elvis Presley

All artists are the subject of many fake claims. Nevertheless, no one is surrounded by as many false information as Elvis Presley. It is quite an irony that the most you sell, the most your results are exaggerated. With the King, we meet people who do everything to maintain the myth, willingly lying to the general public.

The most famous example of that is Ernst Jorgensen who’s the responsible of Presley‘s catalog at Sony. To be fair, promoting the brand Elvis is his job. There is a lot of articles available making wild claims about his sales, articles well known by all his fans. Made by Nick Keene, Tony Galvin, Ernst Jorgensen himself, on multiple occasions, they all follow the same storyline to conclude the same thing: with 1 billion records sales Presley is the highest selling artist of all-time.

The structure of these articles is fairly clever. They present themselves as doubters, mention the “Mr Elvis” Jorgensen to be given more credit, then use accurate but unrepresentative data to imply fanciful conclusions and sustain the billion myth. Taken one by one, claims can hardly be contradicted since most are true. It all looks very credible so we are left believing their wild conclusions.

Today I’m going to deconstruct these data to see how, even if most of the raw data is valid, these statements are strictly false. That will enable you to adopt the appropriate critical mind when reading this kind of news to not be misled. Going through them we will also learn pretty much everything about Presley‘s RIAA certifications thanks to a whole bunch of detailed clarifications. Last but not least, we will prove that the catalog of Presley is now entirely up to date in terms of US awards.