Original Album Sales – Comments
2006 High School Musical – 9,000,000
2007 High School Musical 2 – 6,600,000
2008 High School Musical 3: Senior Year – 4,025,000
Bang! If airwaves were flooded with Rihanna and Nelly Furtado by then, the High School Musical albums were selling just as much. In fact, the first volume topped the IFPI Annual list of Worldwide top sellers for 2006. With 6 million album sales, it was just ahead of Stadium Arcadium by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. The series replicated the feat in 2007 with the second volume topping the list at 6,3 million, with Amy Winehouse second at 5,6 million with the classic Back To Black.
This is where the total of 19,6 million albums sold is truly impressive – it happened in no time at all. During the three years from 2006 to 2008, no artist sold more albums than the High School Musical cast. To be comprehensive, they haven’t sold only 19,6 million albums as remix, karaoke and live sets quickly emerged too. We are going to meet them under the remaining long formats section.
Hey! I’ve been browsing your popularity analysis for a while, and I have a question to make. It seems that you’re using the formula of 1500 streams = 1 album sale, but isn’t that a method used only in the USA? For example, if a song has 500,000,000 total streams, it is unrealistic to assume 100% of them are based on the USA to apply this formula to reflect on total album sales, especially that the streaming data seemingly are private and are sent exclusively to Billboard (in the USA). If that’s not the case, I hope you can elaborate… Read more »
Hi Alfonso!
I’m not sure to really understand your question. The streaming method is not supposed at all to concern the US only, in fact all streaming numbers are global. Both Spotify and YouTube provide streams of their audio/video tracks.
What I’m saying is, isn’t the formula of a 1500 streams accounting into one album sale exclusive to US streams only? I’ve seen you use this formula to gather album sales from streams throughout the world, which makes me wonder if it’s a global formula for WW streams rather than the USA only.
Hi Alfonso,
Every country is free to use the ratio they want but most of them have a ratio equal /close to 1500/1. This is the way the IFPI does. In any case, we aren’t aiming to replicate specific rules of each country – to compare accurately, we have set the same ratio for streams no matter where they come from. It sounds like the best reflection of what is really happening!
Hi MJD! I have to say, this is a very interesting read. The 3 soundtracks show similarities to both Frozen soundtrack (Disney movies) and teen acts (eg. Miley, Justin) Firstly, the HSM soundtracks sold impressively well in South America, just like 1D did. I remember you saying that that particular region has a large influence from visuals and imagery, hence artists with TV shows or movies sell bucketloads there (Whitney with Bodyguard, Miley Cyrus) Another thing similar is what you mentioned, download sales linear for the entire tracklist. Finally, a comment about the HSM trilogy sucess: while 25m+ for 3… Read more »
Thank you for doing this! I was just wondering, was the fourth movie (spin-off) “Sharpay’s Fabulous Adventure” that much of a flop in terms of sales?