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On 13 February 1970, the Birmingham band Black Sabbath released their eponymous debut LP.
This album is regarded by most as the very first heavy metal album ever released.
Their fundamental contribution to the history of rock music gave the band its nickname of Godfathers of Heavy Metal while singer Ozzy Osbourne is widely recognized as the Prince of Darkness.
How many people embraced these satanic flavoured music though? Today, we celebrate this legendary band by studying their commercial success through the years.
Black Sabbath are a rock band from the Birmingham, UK, formed in 1968. More than two dozens of persons were member of the band at some point.
The most famous of them include the original line-up made of singer Ozzy Osbourne, iconic guitarist Tony Iommi, drummer Bill Ward and pass player Terence Butler.
No, Black Sabbath has been fronted by many vocalists as time passed, including multiple rock singers well known for previous works.
Among them are Ronnie James Dio, former singer of Rainbow, Ian Gillan and Glenn Hughes, both singers of Deep Purple in the past, Dave Walker, who was the voice of Fleetwood Mac for a couple of years.
Unusually, the mastermind of the band wasn't the singer but instead guitarist Tony Iommi. Having lost tips of two fingers at 17 in a sheet metal factory accident, he had to adjust his guitar play. Some claim it opened the door to his unique style, heavier sound.
He composed most songs of Black Sabbath since the beginning to this day, being the only member who never left it.
13, the 19th and final album to date of the band, shot to the top of both UK and US charts in 2013. Shockingly, it was only their second chart topper in their homeland, and their first in the US.
While chart peaks aren't the be-all and end-all of success, it's difficult to amass large numbers without ever denting the higher part of charts.
It raises questions to the real success of the band. Was its image too dark to appeal the masses? Was it possible to cross over the general public during the 70s while praising Satan?
As usual, I'll be using the Commensurate Sales to Popularity Concept in order to relevantly gauge their results. This concept will not only bring you sales information for all Black Sabbath's albums, physical and download singles, as well as audio and video streaming, but it will also determine their true popularity.
If you are not yet familiar with the CSPC method, the next page explains it with a short video. I fully recommend watching the video before getting into the sales figures. Of course, if you are a regular visitor feel free to skip the video and get into the figures.
The Commensurate Sales to Popularity Concept (CSPC)
There are two ways to understand this revolutionary concept. The first is the Scribe video posted below. If you are unaware of the CSPC method, you will get the full idea within just a few minutes.
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If you are a mathematical person, and want to know the full method as well as formulas, you can read the full introduction article.
Now let's get into the artist's sales figures in detail in order to apply this concept and define the act's true popularity!
Black Sabbath Albums Sales
Original Album Sales - Comments
Over 46 million album sales across 19 releases is definitely not bad for heavy metal legends.
The career of Black Sabbath can be divided into 3 main parts.
It starts with highly popular releases. Each of the first 5 LPs sold over 4 million units to date.
Obviously, they are no 20-30 million sellers, although Paranoid is on its way to break over 10 million.
If they haven't shook up the masses, they all did a very good job at appealing rock fans.
Each of these albums sold close or over 1 million in a pair of years in the US, a mark that was difficult to reach back then. They were all solid top 10 records in the UK, with Paranoid hitting the top.
After the hot 1970-1973 years, the band's popularity started to slow down. Sabotage still sold well, but from Technical Ecstasy interested consumers were rock fans.
Never Say Die failed to reverse the trend, missing the top 10 in the UK and the top 50 in the US, just like its predecessor.
This prompted the band to change of singer, with Dio replacing Ozzy Osbourne.
Heaven and Hell benefited from this change, selling over 3 million units. Ironically, Ozzy Osbourne also happened to start a very successful solo career in 1980, fueling back catalog sales of the band.
Albums up to Born Again continued to sell to fans of the genre. With this LP, the group recorded its 11th million seller in a row.
Starting with Seventh Star, the group was facing strong difficulties in bringing new listeners.
Its ever-changing lineup wasn't helping, nor the lack of hits.
A bump of popularity in German-speaking countries supported global sales of the group, but they were now unable to move past 1 million units with one album in spite of the highly favorable market environment in the 90s.
In these years of fanbase-driven sales, much hyped comeback album 13, the first studio release with Ozzy Osbourne vocals since 1978, sold 1.25 million units.
Black Sabbath Songs Sales
Physical Singles Sales
As a reminder, the weighting is done with a 10 to 3 ratio between one album and one physical single.
Black Sabbath hardly relied on physical singles during their career.
As an illustration of this situation, out of the 3 singles from their debut album, only one, Evil Woman, was released in more than 1 country.
Their first large release actually came in their sophomore era. Paranoid title track was a hit, especially in Europe, in 1970/1971.
The song sold over 200,000 copies in each of the main markets in Europe, Germany, the UK, and France. It was a chart topper in the former country.
In the US, the song sold a bit, but it peaked at #61, with a much larger impact happening in the album front.
These results concluded on 1.32 million sales. With subsequent reissues of the singles (more than 20 of them), either alone or paired with Iron Man, the song adds for 1.86 million sales.
Iron Man was a slightly bigger hit in the US, reaching #52. It wasn't released as a single elsewhere though. This remains their highest charting song to date in this country.
These back to back songs add for 2.1 million physical singles out of the 3.3 million sold by the band during their 50 years history.
Naturally, there are not much left for the rest. Tomorrow's Dream and Sabbath Bloody Sabbath did over 100,000 units thanks to widespread releases.
The next songs to hit this level were Never Say Die and Neon Knights, both thanks to decent UK sales where these tuns went top 25.
Nothing else ever sold over 50,000 since then.
Digital Songs
As a reminder, the weighting is done with a 10 to 1,5 ratio between one album and one digital single.
Just like most classic rock bands, Black Sabbath sold much more digital downloads than physical singles.
They have a dozen of songs in the 100,000-400,000 units range, including most album cuts from Paranoid plus hit singles outside of this album.
1980's Heaven and Hell outperformers all of them with 650,000 units to date. It is easily the strongest song of the Dio era.
Then, there are singles from Paranoid. The trio of classics Iron Man, War Pigs and Paranoid is way ahead of anything else.
Combined, these songs sold over 5.7 million units. The latter is the biggest at 2.81 million.
In the other side, songs from 1983 ownards are completely forgotten, if they ever got popular.
The total of the band's discography is 11.28 million, 6.72 million of which from Paranoid songs.
We rarely faced a situation as extreme as this one, with 1 release out of 19 taking over 60% of sales in both physical and digital singles formats.
It seems already as clear as water that Paranoid is far and away the biggest generator of sales of the band's compilations and live sets.
Streaming
Streaming is made up of audio and video streams. Our CSPC methodology includes both to better reflect the real popularity of each track. The main source of data for each avenue is respectively Spotify and YouTube.
To factor in the growing impact of multiple Asian countries where these platforms aren't always the go-to site for music streaming, more sources have been added.
In order to account for their real popularity in each relevant country, the below sources have been used along with the mentioned ratios that reflect the market share of each area.
Audio Streams
– South Korea : Genie streams * 3.05 (consistent with Gaon streaming numbers)
– Japan : AWA streams * 100/5.5 (AWA has 5.5% of the Japanese streaming market)
– Elsewhere : Spotify streams * (370 – 8.5 – 9.5 – 33 - 9) / 207 (370 million global subscribers minus 8.5 million from South Korea minus 9.5 million from Japan minus 33 million from China divided by the number of Spotify only users minus 9 million more Asian users) + Genie streams * 3.05 (uses Genie rather than Spotify to extrapolate markets like Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam)
Video Streams
– China* : Xiami streams * 125/6.5 (Xiami has just over 5% of the Chinese streaming market)
– Elsewhere : Youtube views
*since 96.4% of Chinese streaming platforms are free users, that paid-for users pay less than $2 a month and that they are also used as video streaming platforms, their streams are weighted in par with YouTube streams.
Audio Stream value – 1500 plays equal 1 album unit
Video Stream value – 11,750 views equal 1 album unit
Equivalent Albums Sales (EAS) = ( Spotify * 310/207 + Genie * 3.05*2 + AWA * 100/5.5 ) / 1500 + ( Xiami * 125/6.5 + YouTube ) / 11750
Top Hits
Streaming numbers of the fabulous 3 tracks of Black Sabbath are on a league of their own.
Paranoid has well over 300 million streams on Spotify and over 200 million on YouTube.
Its performances in Asia are more discreet, although the million streams on Chinese Xiami is quite good.
Iron Man is now at 200 million on Spotify and over 200,000 EAS from streams.
War Pigs takes the bronze medal with over 100 million streams on Spotify and over 100,000 EAS.
Numbers go down very fast after this big top 3. Children of the Grave and Heaven and Hell still hit 50 million on Spotify, with relevant numbers too for N.I.B., Changes, Planet Caravan, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath and Sweet Leaf.
Paranoid is truly legendary, as apart from his 3 huge singles, 4 of its remaining 5 album cuts rank inside the band's top 20.
Cumulatively, the album adds for 764,000 EAS, more than half of the entire discography of the band.
Full catalog breakdown
If you are familiar with the artist's catalog and want to check details of each and every song, you can access to all of them right here.
Keep yourself up to date
Our website provides you a fantastic tool which fetches updated Spotify streams as you request them, use it to watch these results grow day after day!
Black Sabbath compilations sales
It sounds fairly logical to add together weighted sales of one era - studio album, physical singles, downloads, streams - to get the full picture of an album's popularity. For older releases though, they also generate sales of various live, music videos and compilation albums.
All those packaging-only records do not create value, they exploit the value originating from the parent studio album of each of its tracks instead. Inevitably, when such compilations are issued, it downgrades catalog sales of the original LP.
Thus, to perfectly gauge the worth of these releases, we need to re-assign sales proportionally to its contribution of all the compilations which feature its songs. The following table explains this method.
The distribution process
How to understand this table? If you check this example of We Sold Our Soul For Rock 'N' Roll, these figures mean it sold 4,090,000 units worldwide.
The second statistics column means all versions of all the songs included on this package add for 969,225 equivalent album sales from streams of all types.
The second part on the right of the table shows how many equivalent streams are coming from each original album, plus the share it represents on the overall package.
Thus, streaming figures tell us songs from Paranoid are responsible for 72% of the We Sold Our Soul For Rock 'N' Roll tracklist attractiveness, which means it generated 2,947,000 of its 4,090,000 album sales, and so on for the other records.
Compilations sales figures listing
Full Length related records Sales – Summary
Here is the most underestimated indicator of an album’s success – the amount of compilation sales of all kinds it generated. Due to the dependency of sales of the original studio albums on these releases, they are a key piece of the jigsaw
These numbers are obtained by applying the method from the section The distribution process to all packages listed under Compilation sales figures listing category.
The impact of Paranoid is absolutely insane. Through the years, the band sold a lot of compilations and live albums on the back of this albums' content.
It's not only Black Sabbath records. Former singers Ozzy Osbourne and Dio largely used these songs to sell their own live records. These releases are highlighting in the listing with a red cell.
Once we add up everything, it appears that Paranoid fueled an immense 20.57 million sales!
With the 1970 album overshadowing the rest of their discography, no other album boosted more than 2 million sales of compilations.
As a bonus, please find below the breakdown of the top selling compilation.
Total solo Album (all types) Sales per Country
Please note country-specific numbers may miss sales of some minor releases, although continental and global totals are complete.
Black Sabbath Career CSPC Results
So, after checking all the figures, how many overall equivalent album sales has each album by Black Sabbath achieved? Well, at this point we hardly need to add up all the figures defined in this article!
[xyz-ips snippet="updatedCSPCalbums"]
What can we say about Paranoid? With a bit under 10 million pure album sales, the LP catapults to 32.5 million once every sales avenue is taken into consideration!
This makes it one of the only 3 albums from 1970 to be responsible of more than 30 million equivalent album sales, the other two being legendary recordings Bridge Over Troubled Water by Simon & Garfunkel and Let It Be by the Beatles.
The album has a massive lead towards remaining albums in every metric.
Behind are both Black Sabbath and Master of Reality, on a virtual tie, much lower at 7.1 million. It's still a very healthy figure.
Vol. 4, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath and Heaven and Hell are similarly popular at 4.8-5.1 million a piece.
If nothing else does that well from the band, the consistancy of their sales through 50 years reveals a very dedicated fanbase.
A lot of their albums, even from their weakest periods, managed to amass not that bad figures in spite of charting almost anywhere.
All of it adds up to 77,895,000 equivalent album sales to date for Black Sabbath.
Singles CSPC results
The list is compiled in album equivalent sales generated by each song. Therefore, these figures are not merged units of singles formats. Instead, it includes weighted sales of the song's physical single, download, ringtone and streaming as well as its share among sales of all albums on which it is featured.
1. 1970 - Black Sabbath - Paranoid [Paranoid] - 17,330,000
2. 1970 - Black Sabbath - Iron Man [Paranoid] - 8,080,000
3. 1970 - Black Sabbath - War Pigs [Paranoid] - 5,340,000
4. 1971 - Black Sabbath - Children of the Grave [Master of Reality] - 3,520,000
5. 1970 - Black Sabbath - N.I.B. [Black Sabbath] - 3,130,000
6. 1980 - Black Sabbath - Heaven and Hell [Heaven and Hell] - 2,700,000
7. 1973 - Black Sabbath - Sabbath Bloody Sabbath [Sabbath Bloody Sabbath] - 2,430,000
8. 1972 - Black Sabbath - Changes [Vol. 4] - 2,350,000
9. 1971 - Black Sabbath - Sweet Leaf [Master of Reality] - 1,590,000
10. 1970 - Black Sabbath - Black Sabbath [Black Sabbath] - 1,420,000
If you feel inspired by this list, we just created this CSPC Black Sabbath playlist on Spotify!
Discography results
Thanks to the ASR (Artist Success Rating) concept, we know that the group's sales represent 24.38 million times the purchase of their entire discography. Coupled with their total sales, it translates into an ASR score of 247.
Records & Achievements
- At 43 years, Black Sabbath own the longest period between 2 #1 albums in the UK (Paranoid in 1970, 13 in 2013)
- At 32,501,000 EAS, Paranoid is the 3rd most successful album from 1970.
- At 17,330,000 EAS, Paranoid is the 2nd most successful song from 1970.
- At 327,911,000 streams, Paranoid is among the 30 most streamed songs of the 70s.
NB : EAS means Equivalent Album Sales
You may be interested in...
... best-selling artists, albums, and singles
To improve your navigation we created several amazing cross-artists lists posted inside the CSPC: Data Collector article. Click on it to see the full listing of all CSPC results compiled so far!
... similar artists
To put figures from this article into perspective, click on the images below to reach career breakdowns of similar artists:
As usual, feel free to comment and / or ask a question!
We Sold Our Soul for Rock 'n' Roll (Global sales: 0 ???????)
But the 27 million in the United States are rather certain or estimated data based on those not received from the albums of the 70s ? However, soloist Ozzy Osbourne has certainly sold more.
The one album band. They better change the name of the band in Black Paranoid.
Thanx MJD! Very interesting stuff! Pretty big numbers.
I'm not surprised Paranoid is behind the motherload of their success, but it's still more dominant than expected.
"It’s not only Black Sabbath records. Former singers Ozzy Osbourne and Dio largely used these songs to sell their own live records. These releases are highlighting in the listing with a red cell."
Actually DIO never used the Paranoid hits in his own band. He often played songs from "his" albums though (especially "Heaven and Hell")
Oh, and to call Black Sabbath Satanists or Satan worshippers is a stretch. Acording to themselves they never were.
The one POP album band indeed.
That's the album that crossed over. In the Heavy Metal community many of their albums are regarded as classics. Especially the first 6 albums with Ozzy and the first 2 with Dio, many of which often feature in reader polls and respected magazine's lists of the Greatest Heavy Metal albums.
"Paranoid is truly legendary, as apart from his 3 huge singles, 4 of its remaining 5 album cuts rank inside the band’s top 20."
And "Rat Salad", the one not in their top 20, is actually just a drum solo, lol!
Hi Yal!
Sorry for that, our template has a few N/As for the US since we studied Robbie Williams and I got trapped myself a pair of times forgetting to set back the standard formula for these cells. It's now fixed!
Hi Thomas!
Yeah, the "these songs" comments was a reference to all their hits, Dio has 6 live albums on which he sings Heaven & Hell and a pair of remaining Sabbath songs from 'his' Sabbath LPs.
I wouldn't say Sabbath were Satanists either - but in terms of public perception they no doubt raised curiosity and a part of their commercial success out of this image!
Hi MJD !
But in Argentina as an estimate they may have exceeded one million copies?
And I suppose those live versions by solo artists are included in the streaming stats here then?
Some are quite "big" like Ozzy's live version of Paranoid on Tribute and his duet with Kelly (Changes). Iron Man on his box set too...
Oh, and to a lesser degree the early versions of Black Sabbath & War Pigs on the out-of-print/removed from Spotify Ozzman Cometh.
The DIO versions of Sabbath songs are rather insignificant though (besides Heaven and Hell, anyway).
Very interesting!
It would be very nice to see a Deep Purple analysis as well!
Being from Brazil and a huge Sabbath fan I did some time ago estimates of their sales here, and generally they were 20-30% higher than the numbers shown here. These sales seem to be compatible with vinyl only sales mostly (for 70s and 80s albums). For instance, as the analysis done here show Born Again probably sold very well upon release, something close to 95K upon release. It happens that in 1999 all the Sabbath catalogue from the debut to Eternal Idol was re-released in Brazil, and they sold VERY WELL, they were cheap and were sold in most supermarket chains, in some cases I'd say they sold around 50 thousand copies in the case of the first 4 Sabbath albums. My estimate for Born Again would be something around 30 thousand copies, plus more recent releases would put Born Again sales around 130 thousand copies.
In the case of 13 I catalogued as many bar codes as I could and the sales are for sure at least 80 thousand (it was released in two versions simple and double upon release each one was produced in a 20000 bach each with barcode AA, these barcodes go up AL at least with some large batches of 5 thousand copies). In the case of Dehumanizer my estimates were 120 thousand and for Vol.4 300 thousand.
Hi Breno!
All sales, from LPs to CDs, were considered. Numbers displayed here are already absolute great results for Brazil, the band was heavily popular there. I feel you are overestimating recurrent sales though. For 13, its AA codes weren't 20k x 2, but 10k for the Standard release and 20k for the digital. Also, codes can reach or exceed 5k when an album is being very strong, but after the initial impact numbers are always fairly lower. Here are 13 known codes btw:
13 Standard CD AA 10000
13 Standard CD AB 500
13 Standard CD AE 1000
13 Standard CD AI 5000
13 Standard CD AJ 5000
13 Standard CD AK 1500
13 Digipack CD AA 20000
13 Digipack CD AB 5000
13 Digipack CD AC 5000
13 Digipack CD AE 1500
Please consider that codes which are find online are usually the biggest ones. Obviously, you have 10 times more chances of seeing a 5000 units code than a 500 units code. They add for 54.5k units, with 6 missing ones, likely in the 500-1500 ballpark, hence the 65k adding in a few downloads too (low in Brazil and for BS).
Below are owners of Paranoid CD versions on Discogs:
115 Pre-1999 CD releases (inc. releases which sold in 2003-2005 too)
115 1999 CD releases
108 post-2003 standard releases
121 post-2003 digipack releases
Codes reflect at most 50,000 for all the releases selling since 2003 combined. They add for well over half of the total CD owners on Discogs, so we can't expect the 1999 version to be at 50,000 units on its own. I use the example of Paranoid because it's their biggest one, others are lower, around 30,000 since 2003.
Hi MJD
You are correct when it comes to the first pressing of the normal 13 cd .
Here are the codes that I found: Normal cd AA10000, AB500, AE1000, AI5000, AJ5000, AK1500 double cd: AA20000, AB5000, AC5000, AD1000, AI5000, AJ5000, AK1500. They add up to 63 K, if you assume that all remaining pressings are 500 you'd arrive in a minimum of 75K.
I'm taking as a basis of comparison releases with known sales, in the same genre, for instance Kiss Creatures of the Night with 120K, and for cds for instance Iron Maiden Brave New World with a minimum of 100K in the first year (they were awarded a gold disc for 100k in january 2001). If that is true and Black Sabbath has the same "level of collectability" compared to those bands (which I believe is reasonable to assume), each of the have roughly 300 copies on discogs you would conclude that Born again sold around 120K.
For instance in the case of their most sucesful album Vol.4-566 copies on discogs (if they are in the same proportion as Kiss-Creatures of the Night with 120k copies and 357 copies on discogs) you'd conclude that it sold 190K on vinyl. It has 291 cds, I dont think newer pressings can be compared to old ones, but by taling into account only the 1999 pressing that I mention you'd conclude that it sold 45K. The 2005 release goes up to barcode AL at least (although its only 500 copies), so I think it's very reasonable to assume 15k for the 2005 release (98 copies on discogs VS 306 Iron Maiden Brave New World). So if my assumptions are correct one would arrive at a minimum estimate of 250 K (my actual estimate was around 290).
I did the same for others and concluded that a very safe estimate of 20-30% more than the numbers shown here.
Don`t get me wrong I not complaining about the numbers, which I think are crazy, to think that they sold of the order 40% or half of what the major artists like Queen and Michael Jackson is a lot. And also I'm a big fan of the website, each time I come here I get into a black hole at go to sleep at 5am!
Cheers!
Let's take the case of Paranoid, I estimated 105K on vinyl (using Kiss-Creatures of the Night, 120K sold with 357 copies on discogs), 38K for the 1999 cd (taking Iron Maiden Brave New World as a basis of comparison, released one year after with similar audience, 100K for 306 copies on discogs, although it is probably a bit more than 100K), 5K for the 1994 cd, 183cds registered for 2003-2007 releases would probably add up to more than 50K (barcode goes up to AV2000 at least so I think 50K is not a bad estimate), plus say 3K for 2015 releases. So I'd say 200K for Paranoid.
Mob Rules is easy because there are few releases: 81K on vinyl, plus 31K on the Abril 1999-2001 cds, plus 2-3K for 2015 cds. Around 115K.
Correction: the 13 barcodes that I know add up to 65.5K plus 9 unknown codes assumed to be 500 will lead to an 70 K estimate, which is within a 10% difference from your estimate.
Obviously the author of the article never listened to Black Sabbath. They never praised satan, you ignorant tool.
Yes, it includes all the countries.
Figures were not accurate enough in Argentina to clearly explicite them, but this country is included too.
