Back in mid-1995, Canadian singer-songwriter Alanis Morissette was unknown outside of her native country. A couple of years later, her global debut had outsold career peaks of Madonna, Mariah Carey and Janet Jackson. As a definitive evidence of that success, this album, Jagged Little Pill, has now been adapted into a musical.
The career of Morissette hasn’t always been an evergreen story though. After debuting in 1991 in Canada, she crossed over the main audience 4 years later. Suddenly, she was all over the place. Songs You Oughta Know, Hand in My Pocket, Ironic, You Learn, Head over Feet and All I Really Want made the LP the anthem of the decade. Apart from her 1995 blockbuster yet, her catalog seems fairly unknown. Has she gone through the 90s as a comet or is she simply not too visible on media because of her anti-star persona?
As usual, I’ll be using the Commensurate Sales to Popularity Concept in order to relevantly gauge her results. This concept will not only bring you sales information for all Morissette‘s albums, physical and download singles, as well as audio and video streaming. In fact, it will also determine their true popularity. If you are not yet familiar with the CSPC method, the next page explains it with a short video. I fully recommend watching the video before getting into the sales figures. Of course, if you are a regular visitor feel free to skip the video and get into the figures.
You are so right. But I actually just knew that Alanis and Shania (esp Shania whom I really really thought was an american because country music was always being mention when talking about her) in the 2000s through internet.
Oh and with regard to Canadians who are currently rocking the charts worldwide, yeah Drake and Justin are the most popular canadian music artists but The Weekend and Shawn Mendes deserve to be mentioned too. 🙂
I hope Canada will give us a new and young female artist in the near future.
Thank you very much!
I know she hasn’t sold a quarter of what Alanis has sold (which isn’t even that much) but will we ever get a chance to have a Bjork CSPC article ? She’s a very different kind of artist, she’s on an independent label and doesn’t seek huge popularity but there are many stories about her sales in her own country, in Japan and in the UK where she once was pretty big.
Do J.Lo next, please! She is the only big diva that is missing. I want to see if she has bigger results than Kylie Minogue and Xtina.
I don’t think it’s totally fair to call her a one-album wonder when she had a big hit with ” Thank U” from her second album and the album’s total CSCP really isn’t that bad. 8 million CSPC = hit album. It isn’t a MONSTER album like JLP, but 8 M is still success. Plus I just checked her spotify and “Thank U” is her 4th most listened to song, showing there is still some lasting impact from her second album.
Hi Kris!
The issue is that most of these 8 million units weren’t achieved by SFIJ’s merits, but instead thanks to the fan base created by Jagged Little Pill. We can’t ignore expectations and investments when speaking about a flop. There is a lot of movies that grossed a lot, but nobody will call them successful since they failed to produce a positive ROI. It’s the same for albums, be sure that nobody at Mavericks was happy with SFIJ’s sales!
Alanis is One-Album wonder. Still, surprisingly she is a little more successful than Lady Gaga or Shakira.
Is Jagged Little Pill the best selling album released by a Canadian artist then?
Hi Chrysalynne Lingling!
Well, both JLP and COO sold virtually the same. At this level of sales, it’s impossible to commit when the gap is so tiny, let’s just say they are both on top 😉
I was surprised to see that Head Over Feet has sold more pure album sales than Come On Over album because I’ve been checking different sites and Come On Over figures always showed higher than Head Over Feet album.
Im not surprised though that Come On Over album is bigger than Head Over Feet album “EAS-wise” because the album is way bigger in the USA than Head Over Feet.
Alanis releasing a new album in the future should help her Head Over Feet album get more streams.
Hi Mjd!Do you know Jagged little pill’s Turkey sales or any guess?That album was huge
Hi Bren!
Turkey was absent from the list of countries where JLP was certified as provided by Billboard in 1999. We must say that the Gold criteria, at 50,000 for international albums, was very hard to reach. Usually, we can point out a 25 to 1 ratio between Germany and Turkey, so calculations that we use to estimate Turkey in the absence of certifications give it slgihtly over 40k from this market!
Raffi,
Do you mean Nicki Manaj?
Yay, Elvis is coming 🙂
p.s. reply button still doesn’t work (at least on Chrome).