Physical Singles Sales
Unlike most big historical bands like Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin, the Bee Gees also sold a good share of physical singles. No doubt they extensively used the favorable background of the 70s solid singles market but, just how high have their sales climbed?
As a reminder, the weighting is done with a 10 to 3 ratio between one album and one physical single.
Bee Gees’ 1st (1967) – 684,000 equivalent albums
Holiday – 670,000
New York Mining Disaster 1941 – 840,000
To Love Somebody – 770,000
Horizontal (1968) – 1,863,000 equivalent albums
World – 1,270,000
Massachusetts – 3,350,000
Words – 1,590,000
Idea (1968) – 1,269,000 equivalent albums
I Started a Joke – 1,520,000
I’ve Gotta Get a Message to You – 2,100,000
Jumbo – 600,000
Let There Be Love – 10,000
Massachusetts is largely regarded as the huge hit of the early days of the Bee Gees – it indeed was with a heavy 3,35 million units sold, in spite of a relatively low half a million sold in the US. Other songs were far from being weak as well, as they all sold at least 600,000 copies, except Let There Be Love which was released in the Netherlands only.
So many sizeable hits from each album conclude with equivalent album sales as high or even higher than their original album sales. An example is Horizontal which sold 1,2 million pure albums while its singles sales equal to 1,86 million albums.
Combined, those singles sold 12,7 million units – within a single year!
Great job!
Any chance to also include solo albums from Barry and Robin?
For sure they sell lesser than Bee Gees album, but I have never seen any estimation.
The Top 100 Most Streamed Songs, By Decade in the USA
Stayin Alive the most Streamed song of the 70s in the US.
1950s Mack The Knife, Bobby Darin 24.03 M
1960s Hey Jude. The Beatles 84.74 M
1970s Stayin Alive The Bee Gees 244.37 M
1980s Billie Jean Michael Jackson 450.72 M
1990s I Will Always Love You, Whitney Houston 315.17 M
Source: On- Demand U.S Streams (Audio and video combined) According to Nielsen Music
Stayin Alive has reached over 400 million views on YouTube since 2009
Collecting all the potential “feat” instances will be quite a task, so I will not expect it. You’ve already done a lot. Starters would be the Barry and Robin solo albums at least. Most of the “feat” I can think of would be just 1 or 2 brothers, so whether that counts as Bee Gees, I am just not sure. You have to draw a line somewhere. One thing I would have put in are the pre-1967 Australian albums, but since they were almost exclusive to Aus and sales were not much, they would not make much difference in what… Read more »