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.
How to understand this table? If you check this example, those figures mean Greatest Hits, Etc sold 3,410,000 units worldwide. The second statistics column means all versions of all the songs included on this package add for 213,880 equivalent album sales from streams of all types.
The second part at the right of the table shows how many streams are coming from each original album plus the share it represents on the overall package streams. Thus, streaming figures tell us Paul Simon songs are responsible for 52% of the Greatest Hits, Etc tracklist attractiveness, which means it generated 1,760,000 of its 3,410,000 album sales. We will now apply this concept to all his compilations.
S&G are well above Paul Simon in solo. Their sales are probably in the 120-140 million range, at the minimum ! We’ll see “Late in the evening”….
Honestly, quite underwhelming. And i doubt Simon and Garfunkel did any better.
Simon and Garfunkel did loads more! They were massive, biggest selling 60s artists after The Beatles I’d say!
Yep, looks like you were right.
Ok MJD. I didn’t pay attention to Santana because I thought you were only talking about solo artists and not about bands… And Cher neither. Seeing her face, I couldn’t imagine she was more old than 25 when she released Believe (lol)…
Oh please let’s have Simon and Garfunkel! 😊
Not bad
Never a big fan of simon………..but he has his place. Fav song is “kodachrome” and from
SandG “So long frank loyd wright”
I’m wondering what are the 2 most successful albums ever by an artist aged 45 or more ?… I’ve failed to find one. Eric Clapton’s Unplugged is a live album, so it can’be this one, I suppose… Very puzzling !
I’d say Pink Floyd – The Division bell.
Actually forget I said that..
Hi Winston!
Cher’s Believe is slightly ahead while the still unstudied Santana with Supernatural will be the #1 on that ‘old guns’ category 😉
I wonder if a Simon & Garfunkel article is coming next?
Hi Isaiah!
Yes, Simon & Garfunkel is coming tonight 😉
Thanks, thanks and thanks ! I was hoping this one since many months !