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: Decade #1 sold 750,000 units worldwide. Then, the second statistics column means streams of all the songs included on this package add for 770,486 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 Some Hearts songs are responsible for 26% of the Greatest Hits: Decade #1 tracklist attractiveness. In other words, it generated 198,000 of its 750,000 album sales. Eventually, we apply this methodology to both compilations.