I know about these kinds of tracks - made a few in my time. In those days, instant fun catchy novelty would be played once or twice on TV and sell like crazy - how else could they hear Sugar Sugar or Johnny Reggae or Who Let The Dogs?

But now you can hear them a dozen times by clicking a free mouse - then you got bored; so nobody needs buy them.

Friday is a huge instant hit with virtually no sales to speak of; but she's now an established name so it all depends on the vital importance of those around her building on the foundations to give her a career - and a life.

I think the difference between then and now are the visuals and virual nature of a You tube hit.
"Back in the day" a purchase was made because you wanted to hear the music many times at your convenience. Now its seeing the video and sharing it with your friends. The vast majority of people who made this an internet hit probably only saw/heard it once.

Blue Boy and JK are both right on this. Youtube is NOT like normal TV
and because of that most people will watch it over and over again on Youtube
rather than buy the single. The fact that it got nearly 100,000 downloads in total
is pretty good. UK sales nearly 10,000.

Her chart positions (from Wikipedia)

Australian ARIA Digital Track Chart[64] 40
Canada (Canadian Hot 100)[65] 61
Ireland (IRMA)[66] 46
New Zealand (RIANZ)[56] 33
UK (The Official Charts Company)[67] 60
UK Indie (The Official Charts Company)[68] 6
US Billboard Hot 100[57] 58
US Heatseekers Songs (Billboard)[69] 1

Of course there are others but I don't have them to hand.

For me the new model is based on free (ad sponsored) video/audio streams with sales
as a bonus.

Having done a lot of advertising with Google and also having had Adsense on quite a few
websites I can give a very good estimate of how much Friday will have generated in advertising
had it been monetised from day one.

92,700,783 video views on the official channel alone will have generated at least 10c per click
and barring a total Adwords disaster you would get at least 1% CTR on the ads (regardless of what
ads are rotated). This is on Youtube where they do have a good CTR for their videos.
Google are not the kings of online advertising for nothing. They are because they
get clicks.

so we are talking 927007 clicks on the adverts. Ark music will make at least $92700. Black should
be getting 50% of that ($46350). Add to that the 100,000 iTunes sales (not to mention sales from Ark's
website) and Black will be getting a further $70,000 as Ark are not earning from the iTunes sales
(according to some reports).

So all in all Black would earn approx $116,350 from Friday which would be the equivalent of around
2m sales in the pre-internet royalty model.

The key challenge for the new model is to convert 92,700,783 video views into sales. Sticking with averages
the most sales you can expect will be 927,000. This is based on 92 million unique views which is clearly
not happening on Youtube and which is why SOA, Black et al are not generating millions of sales.

Youtube provides the instant fix and as others have pointed out why buy when you can play again and again.

Going forward, the positives are that as video ads continue to grow, the ad revenue will grow exponentially.
Video ads CTR average from 1.5% to 5%.