Of all the things to come out of the Sopranos finale, I'd have to say this was the least expected. To me, anyway.

The Sopranos is over, but the last song featured on the show, Don't Stop Believin' which the band Journey released in 1981, keeps going as its lyrics say, "on and on and on and on."

According to Legacy Recordings, a division of Sony BMG Music Entertainment, downloads of the song from iTunes went from about 1,000 on the day before the episode to 6,531 the day after. For the week, the song climbed to No. 17 in popularity on iTunes, while the band's Greatest Hits also cracked the Top 20.

On the radio, airplay of Don't Stop Believin' increased 192 percent Monday through Thursday over the first four days of the previous week, according to Nielsen BDS, which tracks airplay.

It was not the first time the band had television to thank for a royalties windfall. In 2005, after Don't Stop Believin' was featured on the season premiere of MTV's Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County, it ranked in the top 10 on iTunes.

The song also enjoyed a 150 percent increase in downloads the week after it was featured in an episode of Family Guy on Fox in 2005, according to Nielsen.

While song downloads were not tracked in 2003, when Don't Stop Believin' was featured in NBC's Scrubs, overall retail sales of Journey's Greatest Hits increased 51 percent in the first full week after the show aired, according to Nielsen.

And for what it's worth, I forget where I saw this, but someone suggested the reason why Tony played that particular song is that the B-side to it in the little jukebox was Any Way You Want It, which is apparently the real message from David Chase about what actually happened when the screen went blank. Makes as much sense as anything else I've heard.