Figures like the 10 million all-time radio plays for Baby I Need Your Loving. The Supremes' dozen No. 1 hits. The quarter-billion dollars that changed hands when Berry Gordy sold the song catalog.

For everyone else, Motown's anniversary could be a time for some plain old fun.

Motown Records turns 50 years old on Monday - half a century to the day since Gordy secured the $800 family loan that would transform Detroit and popular music.

Get ready for a winter blast of warm nostalgia. A slew of anniversary activity is afoot.

For Detroit - the city that gave the label talent, a work ethic and its very name - the good vibes come at a good time. While the city has maintained a dicey relationship with Motown since the label's departure for California in 1972, the bonds remain deep.

The year-long commemoration will remind the world that Detroit isn't all mayoral scandals and auto industry crises.

"This time we get to celebrate," says Martha Reeves, the Detroit city councilwoman and veteran Motown star. "Maybe we get to heal some of the tension, ease some of the bad feelings. It's good timing."

Across the Atlantic, Motown 50 fever has already kicked in. Broadcasters in England, France and Germany will air Motown specials next week. In Berlin, The Miracles, The Contours and Reeves are among those starring in Memories of Motown, a new stage musical premiering Sunday night.

The 50th project was hatched by Gordy, the Motown Historical Museum and Universal Music Group, the label's owner.

Gordy sold his Motown empire in pieces starting in the 1980s. Today, beyond some songwriting credits, he's no longer financially invested in what was once the world's biggest black-owned corporation. But he's still the figure everyone looked to as the anniversary campaign came together.

"The legacy is still mine," Gordy says. "And it's still the legacy of all the artists - people that are here and not here. And that's what's important to me."

Former Motown president Skip Miller says the celebration is timely, letting the world pay tribute to Motown's luminaries while they're still alive. The point was driven home in the fall with the deaths of the Four Tops' Levi Stubbs, producer Norman Whitfield and The Spinners' Pervis Jackson.

For Duke Fakir, the last surviving Top, the timing is apt for an even bigger reason: As America prepares to inaugurate its first black president, Fakir heralds Motown's role in the long process that brought the country there. Motown's crossover success, he says, prompted white Americans to "begin to look at black America a little differently."

"It's one of the steps that took us up that ladder," he says. "Motown music was an integral part of softening the blow, little by little. And that's the part I'm really proud of."

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