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Beyoncé is healthy and take care a lot with her career. She probably will release albums for a long time. I don't see she stopping working until the 60 at least. And she is strong in streaming. Britney pratically ended her selling force and is weak on catalog and streams. I see Beyoncé outselling Britney's EAS with no difficulties in a long run.
Because Telephone has different weight in Bey and Gaga's EAS sales. For Gaga Telephone generated more EAS sales .
We shall see who among us predicted accurately. All I can say that seeing how low the eas of lemonade is, Beyonce is slowly going down. And i dont think she can stay relevant and strong on her next 3 future albums. Prolly an average of 1-2 pure album sales and estimated average of 3 million on others, so thats like 5 million eas on her every future album. As for Rihanna, I can still see her earning more #1 songs and still strong at streaming with her albums having an average of 5-8 million eas per album. And she's still 30, 8 years younger than Beyonce.
Even Celine and Mariah started slowing down after releasing more than 8 studio albums. The advantage of Celine Dion though is that she is from Canada so there will always be a strong support of canadians who will continue to buy her album, plus has loyal fans in the usa especially for maintaining a strong revenue on her las vegas shows, good support from popular hosts like Whitney and Ellen, and also has a great support from french speaking countries especially France that is why there is no doubt that even when Celine reaches 80 and releases an english studio album, it is still guaranteed 1 million pure album sales.
And it's been a while that there hasnt been a female music artist who has a powerful voice that is from Canada so Celine is kinda irreplaceable.
As for Beyonce, there might be female artists in the future who could sing and dance on par with Beyonce
For me, Rihanna has 90% chances of beating Britney's total eas while Beyonce has only about 40% chances.
If you're talking about pure album sales, then you are right. In Asia, Beyonce has 2,550,00 while Rihanna has 1,910,000.
Omg I love your site so much. I often use it as a source for my college researchs. Anyways, is there a JLo analysis on the way? Pleaaaase!!! I need accurate information about her so-called-popularity.
Thank you for everything you've done and thanks in advance <3
Dangerously in love 9,920,000
Survivor 10,070,000
How is this mjd when Dil outsold almost everywhere?
Hi MusicFan!
DIL didn't necessarily outsold Survivor everywhere as there are various countries/continent where the latter sold slightly more (eg. Canada, Europe etc.) Also, if you add all the figures listed in their respective breakdown, you get a total of 9,695m for DIL and 9,815m for Survivor, again with the latter outselling the former. In the end, the gap in album sales is not that large (150K). Also, in terms of EAS, DIL outsold Survivor by 1,3m.
Do you have all her album pure sales estimates for South Korea? Given that she was a good digital single seller in that country, I’m curious about her album sales.
Hi Beysus!
Album sales (at least for international artists), are irrelevant for many years. DIL sold roughly 100,000 units there, but with B'Day / Sasha Fierce it dropped to 20/25,000 a piece and then all her later albums sold in the 3-5,000 range! As you can see, huge singles sales doesn't imply huge album sales there but instead they are a replacement product.
Hi why are Video equivalents weighted lower than Audio Streams? If so, wouldnt different markets with different sales prices be weighted accordingly if its by revenue? E.g. SK song sales for 600 won after 2013.
Hi again Randomname!
Video streams are way, way less relevant than audio streams. They gross much less to the industry. They are also poorly tracked, e.g. largely corrupted by mass multi-streams through various windows and they count plays from second 1, etc. If you open 10 tabs and hit Ctrl+Shift then F5 fast, you can give a video tons and tons of streams in a minute. There is many fans who do cheat to inflate these counts, while audio streams numbers are limited to 1 play per user every 30 seconds. That's why we can't give the same value to both.
As for SK downloads, the point has been discussed multiple times already. While they are indeed cheaper than elsewhere (although nowhere near as cheap as often claimed), they also cannibalize album sales stronger than elsewhere, which balances it out. Now a super successful single can be downloaded 2 million times, worth 300,000 EAS, back in the 90s an album with a super successful single was selling 300,000 units too, so that's fine.
That's also why the gap of ratio between physical and digital singles is only 2 to 1 (0,15 EAS and 0,3 EAS), because while there was a near 4 to 1 gap in price, the download eats album sales nearly as much, so we need to put the factor in the middle, to account for both the revenue and how it impacted sales of remaining formats!
I think "Single Ladies" is eligible for 9xPlatinum in the US with downloads + ringtones + streams and "Halo" for 8xPlatinum and "Irreaplaceable" for Diamond, is it correct?
Ringtones were certified separatedly. About Single Ladies and Halo, yes. Irreplaceable doesn't. It has at most 3.6M and its streams is not so great. The Irreplaceable's 3 Million ringtones aren't include in these certifications.
Uhmmm okay, thanks. So, Irreplaceable is eligible for 6x Platinum at least, I think
Irreplaceable has 200M on Spotify and 320M on YouTube. Judging its performance on charts and popularity around the World it's resonable calculate 60%-65% coming from US. Probably you're right. 7x Platinum is Very possible too
SO what would be your estimation for the certifications of Crazy In Love, Halo, and Single Ladies??
Crazy In Love - 5x Platinum
Halo - 8x Platinum
Single Ladies - 9x Platinum
But with The recent ratio's changes on Billboard I'm not so right about.
Hi MJD!
Great article as always. I read an article recently regarding Beyoncé and streaming and was wondering what your thoughts are about it. The article is here: https://trackrecord.net/beyonces-lemonade-is-still-a-tidal-exclusive-did-it-he-1816210416
The writer suggests that Beyoncé "lost" hundreds of thousands of equivalent album sales in 2016 in the US alone by only releasing Spotify on Tidal rather than all streaming platforms. His reasoning is very questionable since as we know sales in one format divert sales away from others (he actually acknowledges this point but doesn't factor it in his calculations) but I wonder whether his conclusion is correct, if not to the extent he suggests.
As you covered in the article Lemonade's album and single sales were boosted by the lack of streaming availability, but is it likely that over time, its residual album and single sales won't make up for what it loses in streaming? Virtually everyone in her core fanbase has bought the album already, and many of them will keep streaming it on Tidal, but casual listeners are increasingly only streaming music, and it seems unlikely that they'd switch their streaming service just to listen to Lemonade.
I realise it's sort of a hypothetical question but since she and Jay-Z are among the very few high-profile modern acts who still withhold albums from Spotify, I'm interested in your insight.
Hi Orange!
The article is indeed strongly uneducated and calculations don't hold at all against real facts. It states that with 2 to 1 SPS to sales ratio the album would have done 3,1 million - but if it was available on streams, it would have sold most likely about half a million less, so that same 2 to 1 ratio would conclude on 2,1-ish million, the same number it did.
To me it's fairly clear that Lemonade hasn't lost sales during 2016 once considering all formats. From 2017 though, when catalog streams become so much larger than sales, then yes it started losing SPS units. It's visible when you break down Views and Lemonade per period. The latter did 55% of the former during 2016, which sounds good in comparison to their relative success. Since then though, Views gained nearly 1,3 million in 2017/2018, against over 400k for Lemonade. It remains inside the Top 100 pure sales albums of 2018, which shows its sales are still fueled by the lack of availability on Spotify and the likes, but considering the state of the market it isn't enough anymore to match an album with consistent streams. That being said, had it done 55% of Views in 2017/2018, that would mean under 300k SPS units lost to date, which isn't *that* much relatively speaking.
Of course, one may argue the album should have done more than 55% of Views already in 2016. Why am I convinced it is wrong? Lemonade debuted with less than 63% of Views' first week sales. As you can guess, pure sales are much more immediate than streaming points (see Adele vs Ed Sheeran article), so that 63% in SPS units represents less in terms of popularity. Additionaly, Views late singles performed much better (its 4th/5th sold 1,3m together, the ones of Lemonade 700k, in spite of the lack of streams for them). Thus we can see that the 55% ratio for Lemonade doesn't deflate its success at all, it had to be expected considering the debut of both albums, their promotion and the mechanics of each format.
Hi MJD!
Thanks so much for your explanation!
The logic used in the article definitely isn't sound at all, and his conclusion of 900k lost sales (in just the US in 2016!) sounded completely ridiculous to me. 300k over 2 years sounds a lot more realistic, and is definitely not too major compared to Lemonade's overall total, but I suppose we could expect that (hypothetical) gap to continue to increase as streaming becomes even stronger and pure sales weaker, right?
The fact that the Carters eventually chose to release Everything is Love on Spotify makes me think that they recognise that they stand to profit more in the long-run from streaming than sales.
