Digital Singles Sales – Part 1
As a reminder, the weighting is done with a 10 to 1,5 ratio between one album and one digital single.
Mariah Carey (1990) – 173,000 equivalent albums
Vision of Love – 400,000
I Don’t Wanna Cry – 200,000
Someday – 200,000
Love Takes Time – 250,000
Remaining tracks – 100,000
Emotions (1991) – 105,000 equivalent albums
Emotions – 400,000
Can’t Let Go – 125,000
Make It Happen – 75,000
Remaining tracks – 100,000
Music Box (1993) – 450,000 equivalent albums
Dreamlover – 450,000
Hero – 1,300,000
Anytime You Need a Friend – 150,000
Without You – 1,000,000
Remaining tracks – 100,000
Merry Christmas (1994) – 1,800,000 equivalent albums
All I Want for Christmas Is You – 9,600,000
Remaining tracks – 2,400,000
With abysmal catalog album sales for very long, Mariah is the kind of act who benefited from the cherry-picking capabilities of download sales. While not record breaking, figures of her old hits are fairly decent. Both Hero and Without You are million sellers as of now.
Obviously, the juggernaut of this section is All I Want For Christmas Is You. The cult holiday song is close to 10 million units overall thanks to significant sales everywhere, including in South Korea, plus healthy mastertones sales as well – although the RIAA 2xPlatinum award was ignored as this was most likely referring to download sales in reality. No need to say this is the highest selling digital song of her career.
Hi MJD,
Is there any way you can explain how her album “Merry Christmas” was recently certified 8x Platinum? It was certified 6x Platinum in 2019, so the jump seems hard to figure out.
Also RIAA has had some other album certs that are confusing recently. Kanye West & Jay-Z’s “Watch the Throne” is certified 5x Platinum, even though the equivalent units seem to be barely past 3 million!
Thanks
I think merry christmas was already eligible for 7×/8×platinum in 2019 but Mariah’s label only paid for the 6×platinum cert.
Probably her record label havent issued for a re audit on the album for quite some time, and when they finally request for an audit, the album jump from 6-8 million.