The truth about Britney Spears’ album sales in Europe

SoutheRN EUROPE – GREECE

There is very little information about music sales in Greece. This is a small market that remained under 10 million albums sold per year, even during the 90’s music industry hey-days. A strongly rock-oriented market, Britney has been struggling to stay relevant there.

This is something key to understand. Often, fans require heavy promotion to support their favorite artist. No promotion will ever be paid by a music label if they don’t believe there may be positive returns on the investment. In such a tiny market, which isn’t favorable for artists of Britney‘s type, investing quickly turns out to be unprofitable. This is why she was able to pull decent numbers while she was truly big, as promotion was worth it at the time. Then, she disappeared from the map when her fame started to go down. We can see the same phenomenon on a larger scale with Glory or recent Mariah Carey or Janet Jackson albums. In fact, they got promoted almost exclusively to the US, the only country for which promotion is still regarded as profitable for them nowadays. Elsewhere, the album is barely issued to the market with only online promotion to make sure fans pick up their copy. Some 20 years ago, the same albums that are now charting 2-41-78-out would be barely debuting inside the Top 100, but the internet enables them to maintain fan bases even in countries where an artist is irrelevant for long.

Merging all the data together concludes on the following album sales to date:

• Baby One More Time – 25,000
• Oops!… I did It Again – 35,000
• Britney – 12,500
• In The Zone – 5,000
• Greatest Hits, My Prerogative – 5,000
• Blackout – N/A
• Circus – N/A
• The Singles Collection – N/A