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Original Album Sales – Comments
1985 Whitney Houston – 21,900,000
1987 Whitney – 19,800,000
1990 I’m Your Baby Tonight – 9,900,000
1992 The Bodyguard – 41,100,000
1996 The Preacher’s Wife – 5,300,000
1998 My Love Is Your Love – 10,400,000
2002 Just Whitney… – 1,900,000
2003 One Wish: The Holiday Album – 900,000
2009 I Look to You – 2,400,000
It is difficult to define a pattern or even an average for Whitney Houston’s album sales considering how diverse their fortunes have been. Out of the 9 records listed above, two are soundtracks featuring songs by other artists – more on next page about this – and one is a Christmas album. Plus, her latter albums sold fairly low amounts in comparison to her earlier sets.
Nevertheless, a total of 113,6 million over 9 album represents a pretty healthy average of 12,6 million per album. Obviously owning a 41-million seller helps. The Bodyguard confirms its status of gigantic smash by being quite simply the highest selling album studied so far, eclipsing the previous mark of 38,1 million registered by another classic soundtrack, Grease. Its lead is rather impressive with a 3 million gap, plus a 10 million gap over the 5th biggest album met up to now – list below:
1 1978 Soundtrack – Grease – 38,100,000
2 1971 Led Zeppelin – Led Zeppelin IV – 36,800,000
3 1977 Fleetwood Mac – Rumours – 35,500,000
4 1997 Shania Twain – Come On Over – 33,500,000
5 1987 Guns N’ Roses – Appetite For Destruction – 30,900,000
As with every monster success, it makes flops look even bigger. Shifting 108,4 million across her first sex 80s-90s albums, Whitney Houston took a massive hit with 2002 album Just Whitney, an album that has yet to reach 2 million units and arguably one of the biggest bombs of all-time for the music industry. While I Look to You had started to turn things to a more positive side after a terrible decade, the final whisper of the singer prevented us from getting additional chapters.
HI MDJ, can you tell us how many physical singles has whitney houston sold in USA?
What about Waiting To Exhale?
I wonder why hers and mariah touring numbers arent nearly as good as celine and madonna even if all their sales are insane
Mariah was never a huge touring act, even at her commercial peak, she only did like 13 shows total. Whitney Houston was a touring machine, doing over 400 shows between 1985 – 1999, but she toured before ticket prices spiked thru the roof, during the 00’s and 10’s. She didn’t overcharge people to come see her during her peak in the Bodyguard years too. Madonna’s touring numbers were good in the 80’s & 90’s, but she didn’t start bringing in huge numbers until the 2000’s, when artists started charging hundreds – thousands of dollars for 2 hour shows. Celine benefited… Read more »
What’s interesting is that even in the 80s and 90s Madonna far outgrossed both Whitney and Tina if you compare how many concerts they did.
Tina for example did hundreds of shows on her tours, but Madonnas tours were far more successful if you compare how much they grossed with the number of shows they did.
Tina Turner Break Every Rule tour made 60 million out of 218 shows.
Madonnas Who’s That Girl made 25 million out of 38 shows.
Well, yes. Because Madonna overcharged people back then. She always did.
Or maybe other females couldn’t afford to charge as high prices as Madonna?
That shows a lot about Madonnas star power if anything.
Yes, Barbra Streisand charges even more than her. But its still greedy imo. Adele is starting to do it now. Horrible.
Ridiculous. She can charge higher ticket prices because there is demands for her. Whiteney & Tina couldn’t charge as high because if they did, tickets wouldn’t sold out.
Actually it’s not about the demand though, prices of tickets depends on Artist want to charge their fans, because even Tina Turner who break the most attended female concert of all time, Madonna still charges higher than her ever since before, this also applies with the likes of other artists like Celine who’s also had a concert in the Philippines which had lasted two days sold out, far less expensive than Madonna’s one day concert.
Can you please correct in Page 34 at the article, the seventh album doesn’t have question mark(?) in it’s name, which looks like (Just Whitney?) instead of the correct one (Just Whitney)
To those creators of this site, especially MJD, we need an update for Whitney’s article since it’s already longer than we expected.
Hello MJD , what are your estimations of Whitney’s albums sales in Argentina , Mexico and Brasil besides The Bodyguard? for the markets that are N/A i read that you use some formula were there’s no certification/known sales.