Full Length related records Sales
You may wonder why this section exists as you can hardly release greatest hits or DVDs out of a soundtrack. If John Travolta never had proper compilation albums either, both Frankie Valli – along with his past band The Four Seasons – and Olivia Newton-John had various compilations in post-1978 that included their respective Grease singles. Let study how much those songs contributed into their hits albums.
How to understand this table? If you check for example The Four Seasons compilations album line, those figures mean they sold a combined 3,000,000 units worldwide. The second statistics column means all versions of all songs included on this package add for just over 104 million streaming plays on Spotify as of August 24 2016.
The second part at the right of the table shows how many streams are coming from Grease album plus the share it represents on the overall package streams. Thus, streaming figures tell us Grease songs is responsible for 13% of the all Four Seasons compilations track list attractiveness, which means it generated 400,000 of its 3,000,000 album sales and so on for the other records. As a notice, I usually perform those statistics on specific albums. In the case of both Four Seasons and Olivia Newton-John, they released a large number of career spanning compilations with roughly the same 20-hits tracklist. I used the share of their respective Grease hits among their respective Top 20 hits.
As you can see, I also noted N/A for streaming details of Olivia Newton-John. Indeed, while Grease songs represent 79% of Greatest Hits II attractiveness and 67% of the latter, more comprehensive compilations like The Essential, I voluntarily downgraded their share. Why so? Quite simply because her solo hits like Xanadu, Physical or Magic are now deleted from Spotify, which artificially inflated the share of the likes Summer Nights and You’re The One That I Want among her results.
I always tried to avoid approximations as much as possible. In this case the impact is still fairly limited as sales-wise all those albums except 1982 Greatest Hits II managed low sales.
Why not add analysis for the ‘Grease 2’ soundtrack here, as well? Yeah, I know it was flop, but still…
How did you get the sales for Olivia’s Greatest Hits Vol. 2 at 5.9 million worldwide.It Only Certified 2,815,000 Units Worldwide.
Hi GaryHuston!
Certifications are quite pointless at times, especially for old compilations. In the US for example, the album was last certified in 1984 at 2xP, which wasn’t even a date-specific cert since that’s when multi-platinum awards were first introduced.
I would really2 love it if you could do a CSPC of Olivia Newton John. She was a really2 big global superstar back in the 70s and mid 80s. I believe her results would be very impressive. Hope you give it a thought.
Yes, I remember checking out her chart positions etc many years ago and being surprised at the level of success she had in her earlier days, prior to Grease, especially in places like the US, Canada and Japan.
MJD Did estimate her single sales about ten years ago on Ukmix. About 55 million singles, one of the best selling female artists.She is also so huge in Japan , album Physical oricon sales nearly 400k.
I must admit though, I know next to none of her stuff pre Grease and not really much post, bar Physical and Xanadu.
When I was a kid/teenager, I always thought she was actually an actress first and foremost and just released a few songs from her films etc. To say I was shocked, when I looked into her career and found out she was first and foremost a music artist and a very successful one at that, would be an understatement!
I would really2 love it if you could do a CSPC of Olivia Newton John. She was a really2 big global superstar back in the 70s and mid 80s. I believe her results would be very impressive. Hope you give it a thought.
I’v always thought that Olivia was the first to benefit from the success of the movie and its music. She acquired Pop immortality that her previous MOR hits would not have granted. With this soundtrack she won grammy and academy awards nominations and most of all she enjoyed a few years of international pop stardom and reached Europe and South-America.
Hello MJD,
Gigantic success for this album, but less impressive than I imagined. I was sure that its CSPC total would be greater than Led Zeppelin IV.
In this article “http://chartmasters.org/2016/04/france-best-selling-albums-ever-summary-1970-1979/7/”, you wrote that Grease OST total in France was 2.64m, and here it’s only 2.04m. Is it a typo, or did you find another data?
Tony
I hope you’ll do a similar one on the legendary “Bodyguard OST” 😉
Hi Luminator!
I’ll be doing it as part of Whitney breakdown, both her own Bodyguard count related to her tracks only and the total of the comprehensive album.
Hello Tony!
The edition of both Grease and Saturday Night Fever France sales articles is ongoing at the moment. In fact I have solid evidences that all figures reported from 1978 to 1984 about both albums were done using the discs count rather than albums count, meaning all figures were doubled! I also downgraded that way figures of New-Zealand, Netherlands, Sweden and more posted on Billboard, all of them doubled as well!