It’s the ultimate purpose of all charts and sales discussions: define which album is a success and which one is a flop. There are thousands of ways to compare records and as many misleading facts to highlight wrongful conclusions. Obviously, there isn’t a manager nor a stan in the world that will accept that his favorite act flopped. It’s their job to point out every minor argument to have the general public believe he did well. Regardless, the truth doesn’t lie.
At Chartmasters.org, we are very close to 1,000 studio albums analyzed so far with the CSPC process. Among them, many of the most successful records of all-time. But also various severe bombs. Would you like to know which albums posted the steepest declines in comparison to their immediate predecessor?
Some results are truly ugly. There is 9 albums which sold more than 10 times less than their predecessor. The harshest drop is 94,5%, that is producing 550,000 units after a 10-million smash. As you can guess, all numbers are expressed in equivalent album sales rather than pure sales since they are much more representative of the success of an era. That’s why we will be extensively using the acronym EAS which stands for Equivalent Album Sales.
Setting up some rules…
These scores are obtained on a like-to-like basis. For example, recent albums are excluded since they aren’t completely done. That is, albums less than a year old when their related CSPC article was posted. For instance, exit Katy Perry‘s Witness. In any case, it is down 81,9% from Prism so it almost looks like a smash against the albums that we are going to present you here.
Also, exit Christmas albums. It would be unfair to include successful Christmas records from N’Sync, Destiny’s Child, Mariah Carey, Justin Bieber or Taylor Swift just because their proper studio albums sold even more. Additionally, side-projects Soundtracks like Madonna‘s Who’s That Girl, Phil Collins‘ Buster or Beatles‘ Yellow Submarine are also excluded. Similarly, discographies of bilingual artists are split in two. For example, we won’t be considering Céline Dion‘s S’Il Suffisait D’aimer a flop just because it did much less than Let’s Talk About Love. Instead, it is compared with D’Eux.
Cross-artists statistics
Let’s start with a few statistics. After the application of exclusion rules, 832 albums remain. There is 94 debut albums, which obviously have no predecessor. That’s 738 candidates to feature in this article. As many as 213 of them sold less than half of the album they followed. Then, a significant 86 of them represented a drop of 70% or more for the artist. These key data show that dropping your results by 50% is fairly frequent. Consequently, it takes a sharper decrease to be flagged as a flop.
Of course, we can’t define an album as a success or a flop only with the evolution over its predecessor. Market data and standards of the artist should be considered too. Still, except a pair of records, albums that will be presented here dropped so much that no matter how we look at it, they bombed. As a matter of fact, let’s just point out that even Mariah Carey‘s Glitter doesn’t belong to the Top 50 of largest bombs.
Start bringing US politics into your articles like with the political cartoon of Bush and you’re going to risk alienating half your potential audience.
There is no politics 😉
France has a long history of caricatures. We like them, and we do some about absolutely everyone. It’s just for fun, that isn’t a political claim or whatever!
Cher the queen of flops.
It would also be interesting to see the opposite article – biggest album to album gains.
Queen – Flash Gordon is a soundtrack, with only 1.5 songs on it (the rest is instrumental filler), so I don’t think it really counts.
Not me stanning for for the only Cher album I like, her best and biggest flop… #JusticeForLivingProof
For many years, Streisand was the main female vocalist of the American songbook. She wasn’t among the industry main forces though.
She is the only female industry main forces then…
Hi SkkyWill! There was no such thing as “female industry main forces” then, quite simply because females weren’t a force! Her releases from 70s generated 56,8m sales across 16 eras, that’s barely 3,5 million per era. Plus, a large part of these sales came from catalog sales / compilation sales that happened thanks to Guilty. By then she was nowhere near the top acts a la Elton John, Queen, ABBA, Led Zep, Floyd, Eagles, who all outsold her by over 2 to 1. As for The Main Event, the track list is for sure messy. Still, her 3 tracks account… Read more »
29 Barbra Streisand – The Main Event (1979): -82,2%
Barbra only have one song (and two other versions of the song), it’s not the same as other ones
I think Katy Perry’s Witness should be here. She came from two diamond singles on Prism to a ok first single and two flops, not even giving pies away in streets, trying viral videos with a lot of artists, using the tickets’s bundle of her flop tour who came with an album for free, etc. “The era is not over”, not even a miracle can save this era, all singles except CTTR bombed hard. Bon Apéttit and SS have less streams than MR that was not even a second in Spotify’s Today’s Top Hits. They have less until The Cure… Read more »
Hi Goliath! There is no doubt Witness won’t recover. The point is that you need to set rules before building such a list. Consistent rules, with no manual alteration. Various articles were written at the release of a new album. Actually, without the exclusion rule of recent albums, last efforts of Sam Smith, P!nk, Taylor Swift and the Arctic Monkeys would all appear top 5 there, just because their articles were posted right after these releases. I went for 1 year because even flop albums still gain streams on a relatively fast pace during that timeframe. For example, Witness’ songs… Read more »
Interesting article! I suppose That Anastacia’s Heavy Rotation and Dido’s Safe Trip Home would feature in the list if they had been studied.
Not surprised to see Forever and My December so high.
#1 makes sense………I know ALL Fleetwood Mac……….but never heard of this album. LOL
Also, Damn,………… Cher……………..must have handled stress REALLLLLYYYY well…..
But Cher never given up!