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Really? I always thought Celine was massive in Asia, she was one of the two Western artist to top the Oricon singles chart. But maybe I remember wrong
8 albums out of 50 isn't exactly "on par" though...
If we just focus on the top sellers, something clearly changed in the mid-90s when it became the norm to have multiple female albums in the yearly top 5 (it happened 22 times in the last 30 years). A few examples :
1996
1 Alanis Morissette
2 Mariah Carey
3 Céline Dion
4 Waiting To Exhale (soundtrack, female R&B artists)
5 Fugees
1997
1 Spice Girls
2 No Doubt
3 Céline Dion
5 Jewel
2003
2 Norah Jones
3 Shania Twain
4 Dixie Chicks
5 Avril Lavigne
2011
1 Adele
2 Taylor Swift
3 Lady Gaga
5 Susan Boyle
2019
1 Billie Eilish
2 Ariana Grande
3 Lady Gaga (A Star Is Born)
4 Taylor Swift
To Love You More was a monster hit in Japan (2nd best selling international single ever) but overall she "only" sold 7m albums vs. 10m for Madonna, despite Madonna peaking in the mid-80s (smaller market). In the rest of Asia they sold about the same (10m albums) with I assume much more single sales for Madonna.
how is 130 million very close to 180 million? in which world is a 50 million difference considered very close?
Yes but i think artist like Madonna catered to male audience as well , especially with her more mature artistic albums like like a prayer or ray of light
Thank you very much ! I think it's fair to say Aretha Franklin and Barbra Streisand were the biggest female singers of the 60's.
Definitely. Aretha was notoriously competitive with other female singers but I read that she considered Barbra her equal and admired her.
Obviously The Supremes were a group, but id say they were the biggest female singers of the 60s.
Yes. She sold around 130 million records. You can make the account yourself: Studio albums: 29,601,000; Compilation albums: 30,540,000; Physical singles: 51,320,000; Digital singles: 17,490,000. In total she sold: 128,951,000 records.
I couldn't delete the comment above. What happens is that I expected her sales to be much lower than Streisand's and the 130 million is closer than I expected. Anyway, it was a way of saying.
*fixing: and the 130 million is closer to Streisand sales than the amount that I expected.
Aretha is best example of sales are not everything. Her impact goes beyond it. The racism and boundaries she faced, her music stood the test of time. And is more remembered than some of pop stars you all stan like janet types. Aretha is the definition of impactful legent which u all use for every forgotten artist and their forgettable music.
Martin, would you say the Supremes sold more than Aretha did in the 60s? I know that they had massive success on the Billbaord charts during that decade, second only to The Beatles.
Of course by the 80's women weren't already on par with men, but the 80's were the decade of a great leap forward for female artists. Before the 80's I think that Carole King's Tapestry were the only female LP to have pass the 10 million pure sales threshold, while in the 80's you have the followinf albums above that threshold
True Blue, Like a Virgin, Like a Prayer, Whitney, Whitney Houston, Guilty, Private Dancer, Watermark, Rhythm Nation, Promise, Stronger than Pride, Tracy Chapman and She's so Unusual. So, while certainly by the 80's women still had a long way to go it was really the pivotal decade for them and it wasn't only Whitney and Madonna, they certainly were the leading female artists of that decade, but they were at the helm of a new generation of female artists who were finally taken seriously as album sellers and not just mere single sellers
But the OP asked when did female albums became "on par with men"...
A sales threshold like 10m isn't a great way to make comparisons btw because album sales kept growing over time, in the 90s they were 10 times bigger than in the 60s for example. Just looking at these year-end Billboard charts, there were actually 3 years in the 70s with multiple female albums in the top 5 (more than in the 80s), including this one :
1971
2 Carole King
3 Carpenters
4 Janis Joplin
And of course Americans didn't care much for ABBA, one of the biggest acts of the 70s.
No matter how ingeniously Aretha Franklin's record sales are shown and regardless of how many charts presented with various explanations, Franklin simply was not much of a seller worldwide. Yes, she sold in The United States rather well until she hit a null after "'Til You Come Back To Me" in 1974.
The "General Record Buying Public" never tool to Franklin the way they took to Ross. The critics loved Franklin because she sang, looked, acted and sounded like a White Person thought a Block person should and would.
Franklin was always about "Color" and was a prisoner of "Color"; Ross and Warwick were never prisoners of "Color" yet they represented their "Color" unmolested by what the "White World deemed acceptable for artists of "Color".
I am not sure I understand what you mean by "she was always about color." She was a fierce supporter of the Civil Rights movement - having personally funded a majoPride rity of Dr. King's public appearances and travel accommodations. She became a major symbol of Black pride and Black power, and remained active in the fight for Civil Rights as well as LGBTQ rights and Feminist causes until her death.
With respect to your assertion that she became popular because she "sounded like how white people had wanted black people to sound", I think you are grossly minimizing her remarkable talent as well as her overall demeanor and intelligence and sophistication. You make it seem as though she talked like Jim from Huckleberry Finn and looked like Aunt Jemima. That is simply outrageous. Aretha is a unique talent, born a piano protoge and schooled by the greatest artists of all-time who frequented the Franklin home when she was growing up. There is no one else even remotely like her and never will be.
