Streaming Sales
Below table lists Spotify streaming of all songs from the five albums we are studying. The Comprehensive Streaming is reached by multiplying Spotify figures by 68/26. In fact, as shown in IFPI 2015 Report, there were 68 million paying subscribers to all streaming platforms by the end of 2015. While the exact count of Spotify paying subscribers by the end of 2015 is unknown, that figure reached 20 million in June 2015 and 30 million in March 2016, thus an estimated 26 million is used as of the end of 2015.
The equivalent album sales is the division of the comprehensive streaming figure by 1500 as it is now the norm in the new industry model.
Streaming Part 1 – Taking Off
Considering how weak of a catalog seller it has been, Ring Ring doesn’t perform too badly in the streaming field with most album tracks floating around half a million plays. The album definitely lacks hits though as the biggest is the title track with only 5 million streams.
In terms of album sales equivalent, Waterloo is already three times bigger. Although it is still nothing huge, the title track has a nice 19,4 million plays, contributing to 60% of the album results.
With a new album coming this friday, maybe then it’s time
for a Abba update ?.
I would be interested to see the sales for Abba this time next year (10/22).
But those who claim that ABBA have sold over 380 million records what sources do they have ?????
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/event/article-2558702/Abba-admit-wore-ridiculous-outfits-avoid-tax-40-years-Waterloo-band-reveals-story-success-words-unseen-pictures.html
These articles just quote other articles usually. I’d imagine this figure was originally inflated for marketing or taken out of context decades ago.
I have a question: What is with the album sales in Eastern Europe? They are completly missing in your list. On Wiki it says: “Due to the Cold war, Western music was actively discouraged throughout Eastern Europe at the time. Despite this, ABBA: The Album sold an unprecedented one million copies in Poland in 1977, exhausting the country’s entire allocation of foreign currency. In Russia, only 200,000 copies were permitted to be pressed” and due to wikipedia “Arrival” has been sold 800.000 times in Poland – Abba even had a TV-Show on Polish Television to promote the album. Shouldn’t you… Read more »
Hi Bajazet! You’ll also find Billboard articles from ABBA mania years quoting very different numbers for Poland, more in the 10,000-20,000 range, so we should be careful with Wikipedia claims. It’s possible to check our receipts database to see their information, including from Poland / Russia, that we have been able to confirm. When we published this article, to avoid blindly believing the numbers available on Wikipedia-like sources, but knowing they were indeed highly popular in Eastern Europe as well as in Norway and Denmark, we used larger than usual ratio for them when estimating European countries. As for the… Read more »
Thank you for your answer, you might be right (or maybe wrong) – it is not really important, I love ABBA’s music, so “Don’t shut me down” 😉
Can you guys add their compilation sales? And maybe their sales by country too?
Sorry to be annoying but don’t you think that figures for ABBA’s first four albums + The Best of Abba reported by Rca Australia in Billboard in 1977 also include New Zealand sales? Wondering what you think of it?
What are your sales estimates for The Best of ABBA in Australia?
Hi MJD! You obviously did an awesome job with ABBA, as usual, you never disappoint! Just one thing though! For Arrival’s total in Japan, you mention “N/A”. While I realize that means you don’t have enough information to set a precise figure, wasn’t it a (late) huge seller in 1979, after some sort of Abbamania kicked out there following their promotional trip there in November 1978? I think I remember reading rather precise figures many times – including some posted by yourself – on other websites (Charts In France, UKmix or the defunct ABBA World Wide Chart Lists), in the… Read more »