999, 849: Flo-Rida ft. T-Pain — Low

The 00's have drawn to a close. The 90's were the decade of corporate consolidation in the music business to the point where you can basically count the companies that own all the radio stations AND all the "major labels" on one hand. So when the millennium dawned we, the music loving public, had finally had enough. We took our music consumption online, rallying to the slogan "music wants to be free." Music fans everywhere were sure that this new digital democracy would finally put our favorite Queer-core bands, Javanese Throat singers and Avant-noise turntablists into the listening ears of the public. After 10 years of iPods, MP3's, online radio and indie music blogs, our votes have come in and the most downloaded song of the decade is...

LOW, by Flo-Rida featuring T-Pain. A song about spending three thousand dollars at a titty bar that includes free advertising for several brands of gas-guzzling SUV's. The people finally spoke, and with a raised fist they cried, "tell me more about what brand of pants you like to see your strippers wear, right before they take them off!" Allegedly, 5.2 million people PAID to download this song. While there's no way of measuring how many people download a song illegally, I would guess that if 5 million people were willing to pay for this, then at least 20 million got it for free. What is the demographic breakdown of these 25 million people? Certainly, every man who has spent $3,000 in a night at a strip club couldn't make up this massive number - I would say there are maybe 50,000 of those guys in the country, and that's a generous estimate. So we're still 24,950,00 downloaders short of the total. If we add in actual strippers who downloaded it for their acts, we'll say 24,900,000.

I figure that there were probably a lot of guys who like going to strip clubs but could only afford to waste a few dollars who downloaded this as a sort of wish fulfillment. I'll put their numbers at about 5 million. This is again a generous estimate, because in many strip clubs that cater more towards a Caucasian clientele, the music seems to lean towards the stripper classics of the 80's - Motley Crue, et al, or, if the stripper has a lot of tattoos, Nine Inch Nails and their angry successors. But I'll take us down to about 20 million downloaders to move things along, because this is where it gets tricky. From my viewing of reality television, there are many young women these days who, while they don't actually strip, like to dress "sexy" and go out to nightclubs, get drunk, and entice men to romance them with "dirty" dancing. These young women are plentiful, and they have disposable income to spend on music downloads, because guys are buying them all their drinks. There are probably 5 million of these club going young women who bought this song so they could practice their sexy dance moves at home in front of the mirror, and in the car ride into town from the next suburb over.

Now we're at the final 15 million Flo-Rida downloaders. Who are they? The song is too new to be adopted by irony-loving hipsters, too commercial for vintage addidas-wearing hip-hop "backpackers," too raunchy for the soccer moms who like to "keep up with their kids", and too bland to be touted by contrarian music critics who like to rub their love of all things "mainstream" in the face of credibility-obsessed music snobs. I scratched my head over this problem all week as I crafted my review, but after serious digging, I finally uncovered the answer. THIS MAN:

Stock photography model John Johnson, of Retardville, MO, downloaded the song "Low" 15 million times, because he's a big dumb turd. So now, for the rest of eternity, we are going to be subjected to this song every time there is any kind of countdown of the top music. Thanks a lot, Mr. Johnson.