The truth about Britney Spears’ album sales in American continent

LATIN AMERICA – Venezuela

Challenging the sparse information we have for various countries is already great, but this source of data becomes truly priceless for markets with absolutely nothing available. Here Britney’s figures get revealed in full with fairly small intervals, thus meaning a tiny margin of error.

Among observations, two are interesting on this list. I mentioned several times how useful the linearity of an artist’s career is to interpret figures. I said Britney sold amounts closer to In The Zone than to its predecessors. Here we can see the In The Zone album under 10,000 units, which is under five times the sales of Britney. An error? No. The Year 2002 was infamous in Venezuela due to April’s failed Coup d’Etat and then the general strike later that year. That disastrous situation led the industry into free fall. There was a 59,4% drop in sales in 2002 to 2,1 million albums sold. In 2003, an unreal 750,000 albums were sold in the country. The market started to rebound in late 2004 with a +263% increase. However, by that time In The Zone’s promotion had ended.

The second observation is related to catalog sales. Going over several countries and albums, we see very few cases of LPs moving from one interval to a higher one between 2006 and 2011. These rare such cases are almost always achieved by Greatest Hits, just like here in Venezuela, moving from uncertified to Platinum, which means it broke the 10k barrier between both dates.

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

• Baby One More Time – 70,000
• Oops!… I did It Again – 60,000
• Britney – 50,000
• In The Zone – 10,000
• Greatest Hits, My Prerogative – 12,500
• Blackout – 6,000
• Circus – 8,000
• The Singles Collection – 4,000