CSPC: Bee Gees Popularity Analysis
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Full Length related records Sales
It sounds fairly logical to add together weighted sales of one era – studio album, physical singles, downloads, streams – to get the full picture of an album popularity. For older releases though, they also generate sales of various live, music videos and compilation albums.
All those packaging-only records do not create value, they exploit the one originated from the parent studio album of each of its tracks instead. Inevitably, when such compilations are issued this downgrades catalog sales of the original LP. Thus, to perfectly gauge how worth this latter is, we need to re-assign sales proportionally to its contribution of all compilations which feature its songs. The following table explains it all.
Remaining Long Format Part 1 – Live
How to understand this table? If you check for example One Night Only live album line, those figures mean it sold 6,900,000 units worldwide. The second statistics column means all versions of all songs included on this package add for 284 million streaming plays on Spotify.
The second part at the right of the table shows how many streams are coming from each original album plus the share it represents on the overall package streams. Thus, streaming figures tell us Saturday Night Fever songs are responsible for 58% of the One Night Only tracklist attractiveness, which means it generated 3,998,000 of its 6,900,000 album sales and so on for the other records.
Those two live albums are a perfect illustration of the two kind of compilations issued by the band – those focusing on their early years which got sales generated from several LPs like Bee Gees’ 1st or Children of the World and those containing songs from their entire career which are massively dominated by Saturday Night Fever hits.
MJD, is there any particular reason why disco acts like Bee Gees or ABBA has pretty strong streamings yet somebody who is known as the biggest Disco singer of that era like Donna Summer seems to have very weak streams. I always wonder.
Hi Jazz!
It depends on where you are from. Donna Summer was huge in the US, while ABBA weren’t. Globally though, there have been no match even during the disco era, the Bee Gees and ABBA were simply way, way bigger than her. US media tag lines (like the “Disco Queen”) often disturb the perception of the reality in the long run.
Thank you MJD. I guess it make sense. Often times this Queen Of… makes you think they are bigger than people thought they are when it is not always the case.
PLEASE ,one more time ,again and again, the BEE GEES are NOT a disco group ,they are talented songwriters and performers , they wrote more than 1040 songs for them as a group and solo efforts ,their brother Andy Gibb and other artists ( Warwick ,Dion , Streisand , Kenny Rodgers and Dolly Parton ,Ross , and hundred of artists covering their songs from Presley to Al Green ,Bolton, ,Bubble ,etc… etc…) , their dance oriented period and style ( in fact rnb blue eyed soul ) was from 75 to 79 , the Fever soundtrack contains only 5 new… Read more »
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 »