The Collections Database

Over the years, the music industry has been dealing with record sales. As surprising as it seems, artists haven’t been selling their albums only through the music industry yet.

In fact, collectables brands, publishing companies as well as direct marketers have been busy issuing LP or CD collections.

These records have been mostly sold at newsagent’s shops, or through home deliveries for subscribers of the collection.

From the mid-60s to date, we estimate that these third parties sold no less than 3 billion albums.

As these companies aren’t part of the music industry, and thus are rarely affiliated to music organizations like the IFPI, the BPI or the RIAA, and as newsagent’s aren’t part of scanning systems’ panels, these sales are ignored at both ends, charts and certifications.

Genres like classical music and Jazz material have been heavily popular with these collections, with some artists shifting a notable share of their total career sales through them only. Since these units aren’t recorded on traditional music systems, it means that our beliefs related to sales of these artists can be very wrong.

We digged these collections to reveal to you both the main ones that have been releases, as well as estimative figures for each volume.

We will continue to add material to this database from time being, with the first batch featuring most notable collections that have been released in France.

The usage of the database is very straightforward, just select if you want to check a collection or an artist, and type in the related collection name or artist name.