Digital Singles Sales
As a reminder, the weighting is done with a 10 to 1,5 ratio between albums and digital singles.
High School Musical (2006) – 975,000 equivalent albums
Start of Something New – 1,000,000
Get’cha Head In the Game – 700,000
What I’ve Been Looking For – 600,000
Breaking Free – 1,600,000
We’re All in This Together – 800,000
Remaining tracks – 1,800,000
High School Musical 2 (2007) – 758,000 equivalent albums
What Time Is It? – 600,000
You Are the Music in Me – 650,000
I Don’t Dance – 400,000
Gotta Go My Own Way – 850,000
Bet on It – 550,000
Everyday – 600,000
Remaining tracks – 1,400,000
High School Musical 3: Senior Year (2008) – 420,000 equivalent albums
Now or Never – 350,000
Right Here, Right Now – 300,000
I Want It All – 200,000
A Night to Remember – 250,000
Can I Have This Dance? – 600,000
Remaining tracks – 1,100,000
Teen acts are among the best examples to illustrate that digital sales of singles truly replaced album sales in terms of consumption. As previously mentioned, the High School Musical LPs had no successful hit. No airplay means no digital sales. Most members of the general public never heard these tunes.
Still, this page shows they sold a total of 14 million downloads. How come? If one checks carefully, they will notice the same phenomenon that happened with Justin Bieber, One Direction and Hannah Montana, e.g. consistent sales over the entire track lists, rather than a couple of hits selling a lot. This is due to kids liking High School Musical but at times with no money to buy the albums. Instead, they had access to iTunes with gift cards to consume. Our Commensurate Sales to Popularity Concept relocate accurately this behavior by translating downloads of singles into equivalent album sales, more than 2 million in the case of this franchise.
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?