It’s interesting – Mr Watts clearly wants to say “no” but mostly can only come up with “there’s not really a good way to objectively compare,” which is surprising because, in music history terms, the time between the Beatles and Taylor is pretty short. More than anything, I think we’ve had enough time since the Beatles were active for their cultural influence to seep into literally everything, and it will be a lot easier to compare once we’ve seen whether Swift’s oeuvre has the same cultural relevance down the road

To reach No 1 in the 1960s, The Beatles had to sell hundreds of thousands of copies each week. Records such as Meet The Beatles! and A Hard Day’s Night sold more than a million copies within weeks of release, illustrating the very different commercial environment in which The Beatles operated. For obvious reasons, no artist today sells in anything approaching those numbers, making like-for-like sales irrelevant. Instead the Billboard 200 is nowadays calculated by a complex system that begins with physical album sales and then adds what is called track equivalent albums (TEA) and streaming equivalent albums (SEA) – 10 downloaded song sales, or 2,500 ad-supported and 1,000 paid/subscription audio/video streams are considered the equivalent of one physical album purchase.