https://flic.kr/p/9fnb4Z
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, these figures mean Greatest Hits sold 14,470,000 units worldwide. Then, the second statistics column means streams of all the songs included on this package add for 622,202 EAS.
The second part at the right of the table shows how many streams are coming from each original album as well as the share they represent. Thus, streaming figures tell us Aerosmith songs are responsible for 39% of the Greatest Hits tracklist attractiveness. In other words, it generated 5,596,000 of its 14,470,000 album sales. Eventually, we apply this methodology to all compilations.
Hi MJD, in Asia Aerosmith outside Japan sell this way less than Metallica?
Hi Jsak!
I haven’t all numbers at hand but from my memories of the Aerosmith study they got big in Asia only with I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing. Even in countries where they have strong views, this song represents a gigantic share of it. Metallica sold very well in Asia from the very beginning so it would be natural to see them ahead.
Aerosmith:
Asia – 9,780,000
Japan – 7,065,000
Metallica:
Asia – 8.380.000
Japan – 3.785.000
Aerosmith in Japan have sold far more, but there is no history outside.
Except this is inaccurate. Aerosmith has more than 150 million world wide in album sales. And if you rank them by platinum album sales Aerosmith is ranked 14th above metallica, Bon jovi, van halen, the who, Michael Jackson. And Aerosmith has still sold more units in America than bon jovi or metallica.
Hi Wayne! What’s inaccurate is all these good old claims coming out of nowhere and repeated online by lazy journalists who just pick the first thing they read on Wikipedia to fill their article. No, Elvis hasn’t sold 1 billion records, nor has the Beatles, Michael Jackson hasn’t sold 750 million, ABBA hasn’t sold 350 million, Madonna hasn’t sold 300 million albums, etc, etc, and Aerosmith haven’t sold more than 150 million albums globally. As for “ranking them by platinum”, that means considering the US is the World as well as considering that albums is the only format that ever… Read more »
Join the discussion…I heard on a 60 minutes episode of Steve Tyler on an interview and they said Aerosmith had sold 160 million albums world wide back in 2013. Obviously 7 years later their even higher now.
You get about 160m if you add all album and single sales together unweighted.
I guess that’s the way it works for all artists. Record sales are way less these days because everything is digital streaming what you have to have 1500 streams gisty just the equal one album sale.