Digital Singles Sales – Part 1
As a reminder, the weighting is done with a 10 to 1,5 ratio between albums and digital singles.
Madonna (1983) – 364,000 equivalent albums
Everybody – 180,000
Burning Up – 230,000
Holiday – 925,000
Lucky Star – 470,000
Borderline – 520,000
Remaining tracks – 100,000
Like A Virgin (1984) – 523,000 equivalent albums
Like A Virgin – 1,050,000
Material Girl – 1,050,000
Angel – 100,000
Into The Groove – 725,000
Dress You Up – 310,000
Love Don’t Live Here Anymore – 100,000
Remaining tracks – 150,000
True Blue (1986) – 421,000 equivalent albums
Live To Tell – 420,000
Papa Don’t Preach – 625,000
True Blue – 310,000
Open Your Heart – 360,000
La Isla Bonita – 940,000
Remaining tracks – 150,000
Nearly all songs from those 3 albums were hit singles back in the day. A few of them faced the time better than the others. Holiday, Like A Virgin, Material Girl and La Isla Bonita are at roughly 1 million downloads and ringtones each. While good, these figures are nowhere near the big hits from Michael Jackson, Guns N’ Roses or Queen from the same era.
Some songs are more disappointing. Into The Groove and Papa Don’t Preach, two of the very biggest hits from 1985/1986 Worldwide, lost a lot of momentum since.
“Into The Groove” was released in Canada in 2 formats: Cass-single and 12″. Sold 100k copies there as RPM clearly states on their 1986-07-26 issue (at the time had 40k from “Into The Groove” cassette singles made it the best selling cassette single in Canada so far). You can read the original issue PDF scaning that also have other interesting info about other artists here: https://web.archive.org/web/20210124041521/https://worldradiohistory.com/CANADA/RPM/80s/1986/RPM-1986-07-26.pdf I’m sure it must be hard to find info about sales on most countries previous to the 00’s decade as most was only printed on weekly magazines or internal industry reports and still aren’t… Read more »
Hello MJD, I have been following your page for a couple of years now and I have always wondered what were your exact estimations of Madonna’s album sales in Asia, outside of Japan, like how much did each of her albums sell in Taiwan, Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, India, Hong Kong etc.
Do you guys have a link to the claim of her Italian sales of “the first album” (1983)?
Please. Madame x?
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