Since his Tin Machine years, David Bowie never got relevant physical singles sales again. Already past his 40s by that time, the age of his target audience as well as the ever-decreasing market inevitably pushed figures from this format to go down and down era after era. As a result, his last 10 albums combined aren’t enough to add for 2 million physical singles sales of all their releases combined.
As a reminder, the weighting is done with a 10 to 3 ratio between one album and one physical single.
Tin Machine (1989) – 60,000 equivalent albums
Under the God – 100,000
Remaining Singles – 100,000
Tin Machine II (1991) – 45,000 equivalent albums
You Belong in Rock n’ Roll -100,000
Remaining Singles – 50,000
Black Tie White Noise (1993) – 105,000 equivalent albums
Black Tie White Noise – 50,000
Jump They Say – 200,000
Miracle Goodnight – 50,000
Real Cool World – 50,000
1. Outside (1995) – 127,500 equivalent albums
The Hearts Filthy Lesson – 175,000
Hallo Spaceboy – 200,000
Strangers When We Meet – 50,000
Earthling (1997) – 105,000 equivalent albums
Little Wonder – 75,000
Seven Years In Tibet – 25,000
Dead Man Walking – 50,000
Telling Lies – 25,000
I’m Afraid Of Americans – 175,000
Hours (1999) – 45,000 equivalent albums
Thursday’s Child – 100,000
Remaining Singles – 50,000
Heathen (2002) – 30,000 equivalent albums
Everyone Says ‘Hi’ – 50,000
Remaining Singles – 50,000
Reality (2003) – 15,000 equivalent albums
All Singles – 50,000
The Greatest solo artist in history.
That will be Michael Jackson
Best selling solo artist of all time, but not most important or most influential solo artist of all time.
That’s just your opinion, mine is he is very overrated and his sales are poor considering he is supposed to be that good. Half a dozen very good songs doesn’t make you the greatest.
Yes, Jacksons sales and popularity are amazing and his influence immense but Bowie was way, way more diverse than Jackson.
It’s so irritating when people can’t wrap their heads around the fact that sales aren’t everything. Sales are great but they don’t indicate how inventive, creative, influential, etc. an artist was/is.
Who cares. Musical diversity and critical acclaim is so overrated.
Lots of people care, lots of people don’t want to listen to an artist who just releases the same sounding stuff over and over again.
As for critical acclaim, I couldn’t give a toss about it either.
“That’s just your opinion”
It’s all about opinions, except if you believe that talent should be measured by success, which would be very dumb.
Also the version of All The Young Dudes with Ian Hunter and Bowie on vocals on the Mott The Hoople page doesn’t show up on his features.
Just noticed that a number of Bowie songs have recently been been greyed out on spotify and their totals no longer show on the spotify tool report.They’re all on the albums Platinum Collection and Sound + Vision.
Also for some reason the songs credited to Bowie and the Spider on the Bowie at the Beeb album have a separate artist id??