The truth about Britney Spears’ album sales in American continent

LATIN AMERICA – aRGENTINA

Argentina appears to be a tricky case with sales officially certified higher than real sales. What happened there? Well, the fact is that the Argentinian database was a mess (it has been offline for years) showing different award levels for one album depending on the filter used for the search. “Britney” or “Oops” searches would show you both times the same Oops album, but one shown as 1xPlatinum and one as 2xPlatinum. Release dates entered in that CAPIF database were also highly erroneous, a real problem considering certification criteria was based on the album release date.

My assumption, given all we know, is that both BOMT and Oops were indeed only Platinum officially, but that entries of those albums with the wrong post-2001 release dates, after which the criteria was lowered from 60,000 to 40,000, resulted in the display of a 2xPlatinum award.

This poor database is responsible for both having too higher estimates, since we can see thanks to Britney.com data that they sold under 120,000 units a piece. As always, after updating a figure the best thing to do is check if that makes sense. In all American continent countries, Britney sold at least half the sales of Oops, thus the original estimates were indeed looking flawed. So reducing the first two albums figures makes perfect sense.

In the same way Greatest Hits seems too high, given 40,000 units had still yet to be reached by 2006.

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

• Baby One More Time – 110,000
• Oops!… I did It Again – 90,000
• Britney – 50,000
• In The Zone – 50,000
• Greatest Hits, My Prerogative – 50,000
• Blackout – 20,000
• Circus – 30,000
• The Singles Collection – 15,000