CSPC Battle: 1975 Monster Rock Albums
Digital Singles Sales
Aerosmith – Toys In The Attic
Sweet Emotion – 1,500,000 units
Walk This Way – 2,000,000 units
Remaining tracks – 500,000 units
Album equivalent – 400,000
Bruce Springsteen – Born To Run
Born To Run – 1,600,000 units
Thunder Road – 800,000 units
Remaining tracks – 800,000 units
Album equivalent – 320,000
Led Zeppelin – Physical Graffiti
Kashmir – 2,000,000 units
Remaining tracks – 1,500,000 units
Album equivalent – 350,000
Pink Floyd – Wish You Were Here
Wish You Were Here – 3,000,000 units
Remaining tracks – 2,000,000 units
Album equivalent – 500,000
Queen – A Night At The Opera
Bohemian Rhapsody – 7,000,000 units
You’re My Best Friend – 1,500,000 units
Remaining tracks – 1,200,000 units
Album equivalent – 970,000
Very interesting article! Strong result from Queen topping Floyd!
One question. Did you include Run DMC’s 1986 cover version of Walk This Way in your Spotify analysis? I know it featured Steven Tyler and Joe Perry as guests on vocals/guitars, but one could argue it is an orphan track in the Aerosmith catalog. The cover does not appear on either Toys in the Attic (1975) or Greatest Hits (1980). It does appear on latter compilations like Essential Aerosmith, along with the original version of the song.
Regards, Thomas
Thanks! The only thing I’m not sure about, for future battles, is if there is any possible formula to wigtht the way some discographies are structured. You made that point several times about Pink Floyd not releasing a truly official compilation until 2001 (just like Metallica or AC/DC not releasing one ever), and therefore benefitting from more spread sales given that all their essential songs were split in various albums. That was opposed to what the likes of Michael Jackson or Queen did where you could own all the vital songs with 1-2 compilation. Basically, Queen and Michael Jackson are… Read more »
Well, I’m afraid even this point must be answered using Spotify numbers! The issue you bring out is fully valid. I’ll pick up the three biggest catalog acts on Spotify – Michael Jackson, Queen and the Beatles. Jackson / If one buys The Essential, he buys tracks adding for 80,16% of the popularity of his catalog. Once you bought it, no other album represents more than 2% of his catalog with the tracks not already present on The Essential. Obviously, one sale is enough to own his catalog, not even mentioning that the huge majority of people listening to the… Read more »
Spotify is a vital part of any sales work at the moment. I must admit I wasn’t sure when you first mentioned how it makes things easier in several aspects, I think I didn’t get it. But now I realize it is probably a purer way to calculate popularity and compare different acts, and in this case not just for how they structured their catalogue but also when acts come from different eras, were huge in different parts of the world, their discographies have a different size, etc. All that doesn’t matter much with Spotify and similar. Which is very… Read more »
Thank you, Guillaume!
I understand why it took so long, the most difficult part is, of course, checking the Spotify’s numbers and calculate the percentages. I wish it was easier to do that.
And course, proud that Queen won the battle, haha.
Hello Hernán! Definitely a long work, the Excel sheet with Spotify numbers alone has 6332 cells that are not null, all manually entered – and that’s only one out of the 14 sheets I created for this article! The percentages imply we need to study the tracklist of each live and compilation album and to search for each song on original albums and flag them, thus making writting Spotify numbers almost the easier part hehe It was a tough battle between Pink Floyd and Queen, at some point I’ll do it for artists entire discographies and merge all results to… Read more »