Physical Singles Sales – Part 3
As a reminder, the weighting is done with a 10 to 3 ratio between one album and one physical single.
The Jacksons (1976) – 726,000 equivalent albums
Enjoy Yourself – 1,360,000
Show You the Way to Go – 970,000
Dreamer – 90,000
Goin’ Places (1977) – 123,000 equivalent albums
Goin’ Places – 300,000
Even Though You’re Gone – 40,000
Find Me a Girl – 60,000
Remaining Singles – 10,000
Destiny (1978) – 792,000 equivalent albums
Blame It on the Boogie – 710,000
Things I Do for You – 10,000
Shake Your Body (Down to the Ground) – 1,880,000
Destiny – 40,000
Moving away from Motown to enjoy more artistic liberty at Epic, and try by themselves to turn around the relatively low period they were in, The Jacksons started this new era with back-to-back hits. Enjoy Yourself reached #6 in the US while Show You the Way to Go was surprisingly their first UK #1 hit.
The enthusiasm was quickly shut down by Goin’ Places’ era which failed to make noise. One of the big strengths of the Jacksons was the pace of their releases and the public had no time to notice the flop of Goin’ Places as Destiny was issued.
Blame It on the Boogie and Shake Your Body (Down to the Ground) were both Top 10 hits in the UK, with the latter smashing hard in the US also, providing it nearly 2 million sales overall. In total, the singles from Destiny amassed nearly 800,000 equivalent album sales, the highest total for the group since the Third Album way back in 1970.
Just curious, did you add the total of video sales from MJ solo and Jackson 5? Hope those weren’t counted 2wice.
Hi Nathan!
Various packages include songs from both MJ and the J5, so they can appear under the compilation section of both articles. Their sales are spread among both though, avoiding double counting. For example, you can see The Ultimate Collection box on page 40, it includes songs from 8 Jackson 5’s albums. But sales assigned to them add for only 90k out of the 600k total, the remaining 510k sales going to MJ’s albums as per the distribution of streams!
In the case of Queen, their Greatest Hits 1 & 2 alone are well above 50 mill.
I think there are only 3 more artists with the shot of being above 200m: Queen, Elton and Elvis. The latter has a chance of breaking 300m, though i doubt it.
I can’t wait to see Michael’s article. OMG
Are you combining Michael Jackson’s total with these like you did for Beyonce with DC?
When will we ever get a Michael Jackson CSPC. 🙁
Only a few albums were not certified Gold/Platinum, that’s great! 60s and 70s albums didn’t sold a lot of copies by then, with some few exceptions.
Not a huge showing………..but the boost to MJ’s solo material is going to be significant