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Pink Floyd and the Stones were legacy acts with decades of success, actually the biggest tours of all-time are mostly from legacy acts (U2, AC/DC...etc), it doesn't make sense to compare them with recent acts like Bad Bunny.
If you want to find a counter-argument, you should look for highly successful tours from recent acts who didn't have highly successful albums, good luck with that.
About 60 million of Americans speak Spanish actually, which explains Bad Bunny's success there.
It's nothing to do with personal feelings or not seeing it as the same achievement as physical sales, it quite simply is, that they are not the same thing. Streaming is not the same as selling, listening to tracks on an album 1500 times, will never be the same as going to a shop and buying an LP or CD for £15.
My point is not about disparaging current artists success, it's purely that we are not measuring like for like anymore and measuring and merging two distinctly different methods of consumption.
There is no way to tell, how he would have done in a physical era. Maybe it is easier and more accessible for people to now access his music, than when LPs and CDs were in their prime, maybe cost would have deterred people buying physically, maybe piracy, counterfeits etc would ruin official physical sales. Truth is, we just don't know how things would have panned out.
The majority of the top tours in the 80s, 90s, 00s and even 10s have been from acts well passed their musical/commercial peak, such as U2, Pink Floyd, Rolling Stones, Madonna, The Police etc. So while yes, BBs touring numbers do mirror his current musical success, in many instances a hugely successful tour does not always mirror current musical success.
Equivalent is this how it works today and no amount of ifs and what's can change that. Streaming has made music reach places where it wasn't accessible before. Even in my country, western music reaches small villages. Which wasn't possible back in past. So the weightage should be more for streaming. For me that is more impressive than a CD sale.
There is no perfect method and this is how industry is run today. From artists to labels they use this method only to see the balanced equation. For me streaming artists deserve more share because of how they are entering markets like never before. It is unfair to them!
Anyone who can sell millions of tickets and have current relevancy on charts would've succeeded in any form of consumption. Same way we can say artist who domianted western physical markets couldnt have found success in current format. But thing is touring is the other measure to show his current relevance which is also happening in charts. He has millions of people who buys his expensive tickets. He is turning his streamers into his ticket buyers as well as merchandise buyers. The rate of his tickets shows he has the willing audience to buy his product. Fact is people could buy your music back but not interested in your live act. To make people stream his music year after year and bring them in stadiums is biggest sign of his numbers being rightful.
Legacy acts will always sell more tickets as their audience is old. I never denied it. But point is many current relevant musicians will also sell their tickets in any era. Whether it is 80s ( madonna mj springsteen tina)90s ( madonna celine mj etc) 2000s( beyonce britney justin Timberlake etc) 2010s ( Taylor katy gaga ed adele pink) . They have the charts and tours. So does bad bunny. His touring power goes with his chart relevancy which has always happened in the past. Got my point?
Arjit singh in India don't sell a single physical product and only has streaming. But he is biggest act here . And like bad bunny sells tickets like crazy. Bad bunny touring success correlates to his chart success. I have made my points clear. Thank you
Why, it's not the artists I'm comparing, it's "touring power" and showing that having a hugely successful tour, in many instances, is not directly related to contemporary success.
It would be wrong to say nobody has "put down" the the validity of streaming.
This is a widely held belief I've seen floating around in the chart community among especially older folks as long as streaming has been a thing. I'm also pretty sure it's somewhat related to the rather low and imo absurd weighting methods applied to keep physical sales relevant on many European charts.
Ofc this goes both ways with (especially younger) people giving way too much weight to downloads and streams too cause it favours their favourite artists' numbers or whatnot. In the end a lot of people just cherry pick whatever method fits their agenda it seems 🙂
I think we agree that streams and album sales aren't the same and thus can never be compared to each other 100% accurately. But isn't the whole point of this site to compare different formats from different eras as fair as possible? Cause I really don't feel like these repeated "what if scenarios" I honestly see way too often lead us to any meaningful places.
Touring isn't something I want to get too much into detail on but surely you can see those all those acts that do best there if not currently were at least hugely successful at one point in the past and have built up a reputation.
Question :
If listening to tracks on an album 1500 times , streaming platform will receive the same money as if buy one physical copy of that album ? 1500 listens = £15 , as for LP ?
No but billboard removes the production budget of a cd. So they factor remaining I thing. Which is right because there is no physical CD. I think
I was meaning specifically on here, where I can't recall anybody denigrating streaming in that manner. Yes, in the wider community, lot's do it. I think in the UK, a big issue some chart forum people have is, the huge increase in tracks being certified and highly certified. They believe it's too easy to get these huge certification totals, at such a rate and so quickly, especially when they were relatively few and far between, in the physical era. .
Yes, I get that's one of the main things of the site but I just feel the two are so different, it sometimes doesn't even make sense to compare them. I also have my various "album" issues, as you and Guillaume both know well lol
Yes, my point was just that a hugely successful tour, is not always indicative of an artists current commercial success.
Yes, I don't think I've seen much of it here, as of recent at least.
I do get this sentiment in regards to certifications being too easy. They objectively are.
Requirements for single certifications should be way way higher now to get the same "prestige" they had back in the day. Single formats including streaming now represent well over 3/4 if not more of units in most markets while this share used to be way way lower in the past as full albums were dominating.
Personally I prefer the Japanese way of certifying streams, downloads, and physical sales separately (at least for singles) to whatever the OCC etc are doing with their "single units". These totals feels so useless and won't even be somewhat comparable to older tracks unless album sales are added to the equation.
As for the tour I think that only applies to older artists since they have a lot of fans (often with more money too). If a newer act is pulling monster numbers then they're getting a lot of sales and/or streams as well. You simply can't do that large tours without huge hits or a huge fanbase, and that applies even more so to acts like Bad Bunny who tours in generally poorer countries than your average US/EU artists.
UVST currently looks like it will keep its title of biggest era of the 2020s. Midnights is its only real threat
What is ArtistRatio for Bad Bunny ? Or any artist ? If we're looking at his streaming data :
All DSPs - 83,498 billion streams
Spotify - 63,525 billion streams
Then : 83,498/63,525=1,3144 . Maybe it is ? I don't understand .
With that Ratio "UVST" must reach 15,255 million EAS on streaming . 1,032 million EAS less then in this article .
I know, I live here lol. But he is popular even with people who don't know a word of Spanish. Which is great.
Hi Denysanatol!
On the surface, his ratio is indeed at 1.31442. It's a bit more complicated overall though. On CSPCs streams combine 4 elements:
(1) Spotify streams
(2) extrapolation of Spotify streams for audio platforms with unknown numbers (say Apple Music)
(3) streams retrieved from other platforms (Genie, Audiomack, etc.) and the platforms they extrapolate themselves (like MelOn)
(4) video streams, which are mostly YouTube x1.1
The 'ArtistRatio' from the streaming tool extrapolates (1) into (1)+(2)+(3). Thus, on CSPCs, we use another ratio, slightly lower, which excludes the share of the extrapolation that represented streams from (3), as these are actually retrieved in full. That doesn't change too much for Bad Bunny obviously as he isn't crushing Asian platforms.
Also, the ArtistRatio used is the one from the lead artist, so we can't really take the total of an artist discography for CSPCs as there are orphan songs as well. For example, for the song I Like It, it uses the artist ratio of Cardi B (1.88346), which is a lot higher than Bad Bunny's.
As for the 1.03 million gap with UVST, I'm not too sure at how you arrived at that number. If we simply use Spotify streams and apply the ratio as it seems you did, then the total would be 14.7b * 1.31442 / 1500 = 12.88 million, which is 3.37 million short of the number shown on his CSPC. This gap is due to the element (4), video streams, as UVST claims a ridiculously massive 16.1 billion views on YouTube, actually more than its Spotify total!
Thank YOU ! I am just used your data that I can see :
(14,678 *10^9*1,31442+663000*2,2*2+372000*68/4)/1500+(16,111*10^9+1828000)/6750=15 255 389,3 EAS .
But now I see that I'm not used Index 1,1 for YouTube and include digital sales .
Now I have 15 494 081,3 EAS . You had 16,244 million EAS . Difference 0,75 million EAS partly is from 2) and 3) , I think .
16.1 * 1.1 / 6750 = 2.62 million, not 3.37?
Also I'm pretty sure the total for UVST was 15.6m or so just a few days ago, and now it's 16.4m...
3,37 is not from YouTube only . Is "Total - Spotify *1,31442/1500" . 15,6 m is according old formula based on number of users of streaming platforms .
It seems to me like this most recent project is already losing steam.
For example, at the same time USVT still held 9/10 of the top 10 on Spotify daily charts in Mexico, and all 23 tracks in the top 50.
Nadie Sabe has 2/10 of the top tracks in Mexico, and charts only 6 in the top 50, with some tracks even being out of the top 200.
The results are similar across LATAM and Western Europe.
It could be entirely due to the different sound of the album compared to USVT, but the ticket price backlash he is currently receiving won't help.
There's one more ratio that isn't mentioned here because it's kinda technical so I make it simple by mentioning the "Artist Ratio" but that one is indeed the combination of 2 internal ratios.
The first one is related to the artist, it's 1.31442 for Bad Bunny. That one means "based on the distribution of listeners through his top 50 cities, Spotify represents 76.07918% of his streams", which is equal to multiplying Spotify streams by 1.31442.
Then, there's a genre-related ratio, to adjust the fact that cities may not be reflecting exactly the streams distribution. I'll take an example easy to understand: Indian artists. Indian cities are so big that in general almost all cities from the top 50 of their artists are from India alone. Yet, Indian artists have some reach overseas thanks to the diaspora. As the market share of Spotify in India is relatively weak, streams are strongly extrapolated, yet that misses out streams these artists are getting from the UK, US, Canada, etc.
For that, I took an empirical approach and looked at the % of non-Indian streams from various examples of songs which charted on global charts, and valued where these streams were coming from, and applied the market ratio to the ones effectively coming from the UK, Canada, etc, even if no UK or Canadian cities made the top 50.
That's why for Hindi artists I apply a second ratio that is 0.973918, to offset the fact that non-Indian cities are under represented among their artists' top 50.
In the same way, Latin artists are massive in Latin America but still get streams from many markets, where Spotify is usually not as strong. That means we apply a small extrapolation ratio for the top 50 (as Spotify is strong in Mexico, Argentina, etc), yet the artists are getting solid streams in countries less represented on that top 50 (most notably from Europe). That concludes on top 50s lowering the extrapolation for Latin acts, hence an adjustment ratio of 1.04367 for them.
The exact ratio of Bad Bunny, that is showing in the streaming tool results for example, is thus 1.31442 * 1.04367.
By the way, it may come as a surprise that he climbs compared to former numbers when Latin artists underperform the Spotify ratio based on global users. Myself I had forgotten that for his previous update I already used what I called a "Latin ratio", considering Spotify accounted for 72% of streams in the region. As he is actually more global than the "average" latin act, he actually slightly overperforms that ratio which was previously used for him.
PS: it's all good for CSPCs, but as you can understand between the lines, the All DSP list misses out on applying that genre-related ratio, I'll fix that.
Bad Bunny sells nothing outside of streaming, in the case of UVST 157k (album + digital singles). So audio streaming (12.9m) + video streaming (2.6m) = 15.5m. And again, the total was 15.6m a few days ago.
It has over 30m daily streams two weeks in which is still very strong. Monaco and Perro Negro are demonstrating potential for longevity. It's clear this won't be as big as UVST which is expected as it isn't as commercial friendly, but I thinks absurd to expect that he would maintain that level forever. UVST is one of the biggest albums ever.
