Cranberries albums and songs sales

Even during the most hyped years of the rock band Cranberries their singer Dolores O’Riordan wasn’t known for excesses. Her death on January 15, 2018 at only 46 came as a real shocker.

They band rose to fame in English-speaking countries thanks to the single Linger in early 1994. One year later the cult hit Zombie made them one of the biggest bands in the world. Their fame was short-lived in several markets, but their tunes remain sweet memories for millions of people.

ChartMasters’ method: the CSPC

As usual, I’ll be using the Commensurate Sales to Popularity Concept (CSPC) in order to relevantly gauge the act’s results. It will not only bring you sales information for all albums, physical and download singles, as well as audio and video streaming. In fact, it will really determine the act’s popularity.

If you are not yet familiar with the CSPC method, below is a nice and short video of explaining the concept. I recommend watching it before reading on and to the sales figures. You’ll get the idea in just two minutes.

And if you want to know the full method as well as formulas, you can read the full introduction article.

Now let’s get into the artist’s detailed sales figures!

Original Albums Sales

Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We? (1993)

No Need to Argue (1994)

• America
  • US – 7,650,000
  • Canada – 825,000
  • Argentina – 75,000
  • Brazil – 260,000
  • Mexico – 250,000
• Asia – 1,160,000
  • Japan – 200,000
• Oceania
  • Australia – 525,000
  • New Zealand – 125,000
• Europe – 6,770,000
  • UK – 1,100,000
  • France – 1,545,000
  • Germany – 1,350,000
  • Italy – 445,000
  • Spain – 375,000
  • Sweden – 185,000
  • Netherland – 180,000
  • Switzerland – 110,000
  • Austria – 100,000
  • Finland – 32,000
• World – 17,840,000

To the Faithful Departed (1996)

Bury the Hatchet (1999)

Wake Up and Smell the Coffee (2001)

Roses (2012)

Original Album Sales – Comments

1993 Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We? – 8,520,000
1994 No Need to Argue – 17,840,000
1996 To the Faithful Departed – 6,230,000
1999 Bury the Hatchet – 3,510,000
2001 Wake Up and Smell the Coffee – 1,390,000
2012 Roses – 160,000

With an Oasis-like trajectory the Cranberries enjoyed 3 fairly solid albums in as many years with one peak over 17 million before facing harder times. In total their 6 studio albums sold close to 38 million units.

Details are bizarre. Some 72,5% of Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We?‘s sales come from the US and the UK. From Bury the Hatchet, these countries forgot about them – a mere 18% of its sales were achieved in the two countries. The album sold for example more than 3 times more in Italy than in the UK. It was successful in continental Europe, Latin America and Asia.

The trend continued with Wake Up and Smell the Coffee which still did quite well in some areas but bombed hard in the main markets, leading to the band spltting. Their attempt at a comeback in 2012 with Roses failed completely.

Physical Singles Sales

As a reminder, the weighting is done with a 10 to 3 ratio between one album and one physical single.

With a pair of million sellers, the Cranberries did OK in physical singles sales. Linger managed a million mostly thanks to sales in the US and the UK, while Zombie did so with no US release and a dreadful 75,000 units in the UK. It was a monster #1 smash in France, Germany and Australia though.

The figure of nearly 400,000 units from Ode to my Family is good, although once again atypical as half of those sales were achieved in France alone. Later singles sold poorly overall. The band’s total in this format is 4,1 million.

Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We? (1993) – 375,000 equivalent albums

Dreams – 210,000
Linger – 1,040,000

No Need to Argue (1994) – 624,000 equivalent albums

Ode to My Family – 390,000
I Can’t Be with You – 110,000
Zombie – 1,510,000
Ridiculous Thoughts – 70,000

To the Faithful Departed (1996) – 144,000 equivalent albums

Salvation – 250,000
When You’re Gone – 30,000
Free to Decide – 200,000

Bury the Hatchet (1999) – 78,000 equivalent albums

Animal Instinct – 40,000
Promises – 200,000
Just My Imagination – 20,000

Wake Up and Smell the Coffee (2001) – 12,000 equivalent albums

Analyse – 30,000
Time Is Ticking Out – 10,000

Roses (2012) – 0 equivalent albums

Tomorrow – 0

Orphan – 3,000 equivalent albums

All remaining singles / EPs – 10,000

Digital Singles Sales

As a reminder, the weighting is done with a 10 to 1,5 ratio between one album and one digital single.

It’s only a matter of time before Zombie tops 3 million digital sales. The band fell into obscurity two decades ago but this track remains a stand-out classic. Both Linger and Dreams, well over 1 million each, are also still popular to this day.

The rest of the band’s catalog is far less shiny nowadays, bringing their cumulative to date downloads and ringtones total to only 8,2 million units.

Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We? (1993) – 458,000 equivalent albums

Dreams – 1,260,000
Linger – 1,640,000
Remaining tracks – 150,000

No Need to Argue (1994) – 570,000 equivalent albums

Ode to My Family – 550,000
Zombie – 2,850,000
Remaining tracks – 400,000

To the Faithful Departed (1996) – 75,000 equivalent albums

Salvation – 125,000
When You’re Gone – 250,000
Remaining tracks – 125,000

Bury the Hatchet (1999) – 90,000 equivalent albums

Animal Instinct – 200,000
Promises – 100,000
Just My Imagination – 200,000
Remaining tracks – 100,000

Wake Up and Smell the Coffee (2001) – 15,000 equivalent albums

All tracks – 100,000

Roses (2012) – ,000 equivalent albums

All tracks – 80,000

Orphan – 11,000 equivalent albums

All tracks – 75,000

Streaming Sales

Streaming is made up of two families – audio and video. Our CSPC methodology now includes both to better reflect the real popularity of each track. The main source of data for each avenue is respectively Spotify and YouTube. As detailed in the Fixing Log article, Spotify represents 132 million of the 212 million users of streaming platforms, while YouTube is pretty much the only video platform generating some revenue for the industry. Below is the equivalence set on the aforementioned article:

Audio Stream – 1500 plays equal 1 album unit
Video Stream – 11,750 views equal 1 album unit

Equivalent Albums Sales (EAS) = 212/132 * Spotify streams / 1500 + YouTube views / 11750

Part 1

Rock albums which sold so many units during the 90s are expected to be streamed quite heavily on Spotify. Album cuts from Everybody Else… and No Need to Argue all have so-so streams, not too bad, but not good either.

What’s undeniable is the strength of a pair of songs from both of them. Their debut includes Linger, closing in 100 million streams on Spotify, and Dreams, already over 50 million.

From the second album, the pack is logically dominated by Zombie with a tremendous 163 million streams on Spotify and an immense 733 million on YouTube. Ode to My Family remains popular at 40 million on Spotify.

These solid tracks push equivalent album sales of those albums to respectively 201,000 and 332,000 units.

Part 2

Not much is left nowadays from To the Faithful Departed. When You’re Gone is the leading song with a modest 13 million. The album’s entire track list adds for 35 million. Overall it has 46,000 equivalent album sales.

A lower seller initially, Bury the Hatchet holds better. Just My Imagination, a song which failed to chart in both the US and the UK, is slowly growing in popularity with 16 million streams while Animal Instinct is a close second at 14 million. All streams from the album in total are worth 64,000 equivalent album sales.

Part 3

Well, not much to say about these songs given they are all but forgotten. The post-90s material of the band is really ignored by the general public.

Full Length related record Sales

It sounds fairly logical to add together weighted sales of one era – studio album, physical singles, downloads, streams – to get the full picture of an album’s popularity. For older releases though, they also generate sales of various live, music videos and compilation albums.

All those packaging-only records do not create value, they exploit the value originating from the parent studio album of each of its tracks instead. Inevitably, when such compilations are issued, this downgrades catalog sales of the original LP. Thus, to perfectly gauge the worth of these releases, we need to re-assign sales proportionally to its contribution of all the compilations which feature its songs. The following table explains this method.

Part 1

How to understand this table? If you check for example the Stars: The Best of 1992-2002 line, those figures mean it sold 2,660,000 units worldwide. The second statistics column means all versions of all the songs included on this package add for 583,000 equivalent album sales from streams of all types.

The second part on the right of the table shows how many equivalent streams are coming from each original album, plus the share it represents on the overall package. Thus, streaming figures tell us songs from the No Need to Argue album are responsible for  52% of the Stars: The Best of 1992-2002 track list attractiveness. This means it generated 1,383,000 of its 2,660,000 album sales and so forth for the other records.

Since very few songs represent the overwhelming majority of the catalog strength, the distribution pattern of sales is almost always the same with the first two albums accounting for 85% of all sales.

Part 2

A complete list of live albums, music videos and box sets, most of which sold poorly. The sales distribution continues to be the same with the first two albums dominating track lists.

Full Length related records Sales – Summary

Here is the most underestimated indicator of an album’s success – the amount of compilation sales of all kinds it generated. Due to the dependency of sales of the original studio albums on these releases, they are a key piece of the jigsaw.

BONUS: Total Album (all types) Sales per Country

• America
  • US – 17,060,000
  • Canada – 1,830,000
  • Argentina – 200,000
  • Brazil – 735,000
  • Mexico – 715,000
• Asia – 2,925,000
  • Japan – 700,000
• Oceania
  • Australia – 990,000
  • New Zealand – 250,000
• Europe – 15,730,000
  • UK – 2,625,000
  • France – 3,610,000
  • Germany – 2,515,000
  • Italy – 1,460,000
  • Spain – 1,065,000
  • Sweden – 345,000
  • Netherland – 415,000
  • Switzerland – 280,000
  • Austria – 215,000
  • Finland – 85,000
• World – 41,050,000

Please note that some of the countries totals may be slightly incomplete when the figure is N/A for minor releases. Countries with too much missing information to be precise enough are listed as N/A.

Cranberries Career CSPC Results

So, after checking all the figures, how many overall equivalent album sales has each album by Cranberries achieved? Well, at this point we hardly need to add up all of the figures defined in this article!

In the following results table, all categories display figures in equivalent album sales. If different, pure sales are listed between parentheses.

'Av.' stands for Average, 'LD' for Last Day.

As a reminder:

• Studio Album: sales of the original album
• Other Releases: sales of compilations generated thanks to the album
• Physical Singles: sales of physical singles from the album (ratio 3/10)
• Download Singles: sales of digital singles from the album (ratio 1,5/10)
• Streaming: equivalent album sales of all the album tracks (ratio 1/1500 for Audio stream and 1/6750 for Video stream)

Artist career totals

See where the artist ranks among remaining singers

The popularity of a band may disappear with time, but the numbers remain to testify to what happened in the past. From a 2018 perspective it may be difficult to believe that the Cranberries were once the biggest band on Earth. Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We? cracks the 10 million barrier in terms of overall equivalent album sales generated.

The follow up album No Need to Argue achieved a milestone even more impressive – 20 million units. It currently stands at 21,3 million to be exact, making it one of the biggest rock albums of the 90s.

The decreasing success is evident in the numbers for To the Faithful Departed and Bury the Hatchet but they still reach 10 million cumulatively. Wake up bombed while Roses was a non-event.

In total, the Cranberries are up to 44,5 million equivalent album sales. While they started stronger than Oasis they are now lying 14 million behind. The band remains ahead of successful bands like the Foo Fighters.

The following section list their most successful songs as well as their records and achievements.

As usual, feel free to comment and / or ask a question!

Sources: IFPI, Spotify, YouTube, Chartmasters.org.

BIGGEST TRACKS – Cranberries

The list of most successful songs is compiled in album equivalent sales generated by each of them. It includes the song’s own physical singles sales with a 0,3 weighting, its download and streaming sales, and with appropriate weighting too, plus its share among sales of all albums on which it is featured.

1. 1994 – Zombie [No Need to Argue] – 15,370,000
2. 1993 – Linger [Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We?] – 6,280,000
3. 1992 – Dreams [Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We?] – 3,460,000
4. 1994 – Ode to My Family [No Need to Argue] – 3,220,000
5. 1996 – When You’re Gone [To the Faithful Departed] – 2,820,000
6. 1996 – Salvation [To the Faithful Departed] – 1,470,000
7. 1999 – Just My Imagination [Bury the Hatchet] – 1,280,000
8. 1999 – Animal Instinct [Bury the Hatchet] – 1,220,000
9. 1996 – Free to Decide [To the Faithful Departed] – 770,000
10. 1999 – Promises [Bury the Hatchet] – 670,000

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