The truth about Britney Spears’ album sales in Oceania & Africa

Global album sales

There was no suspense about the ranking between each album, with BOMT topping the list and sales going down album after album with the exception of Circus.

All first three albums out-performed previous estimates by 1% to 1,8% each as they were previously set on 23,5 million, 18,6 million and 10 million. The gap is almost exclusively due to bigger than expected sales from the Philippines and Indonesia.

Both In The Zone and Greatest Hits were over-estimated as their sales outside of the main markets came nowhere near to the results of their predecessors. The compilation is the most striking example. In Japan, it outsold Oops by almost 2 to 1, nevertheless in the rest of Asia it sold less than half of its sales. The situation is almost the same in the UK / Europe. In the UK, Greatest Hits outsold Oops, in the rest of Europe though it sold 3 times less.

The over-estimation of recent albums is in line with unexpectedly low IFPI figures on their recent year end reports. It appears more and more clear that South Korea isn’t the only market that was once relevant but completely vanished in recent years. The music industry crisis reduced promotion investments and those budgets reductions have logically been made on markets low in size and harder to penetrate for international stars. Plus, the lower is the average income of the inhabitants from a country, the biggest has been piracy issues during the 00s and the fastest they jumped into YouTube streaming.

The combined total of those 8 albums is almost 73 million. This is less than 1 million short of the previously estimated tally of 73,8 million, which represents an error of 1,1%.