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For all additional questions about Chinese sales, some things need to be clarified.
The first point is that physical sales from China have been counted just like sales of anywhere else. It may sound silly but it's important to be precise, it's not Chinese album sales which are adjusted but only their downloads 🙂
Now, about downloads, as stated with streams, accounting for them with no ratio completely distort the real size of the market. Counting fresh new releases sold for $2 available on services available directly through the smartphone of hundreds of millions people would be strongly unfair to any other artist selling copies elsewhere. If tomorrow Adele releases an album to Spotify / Apple Music with streams blocked but available for sale at $2, she would top Thriller in no time, that would make very little sense.
About the IFPI, it's important to really understand what it all means. The IFPI list has no methodology. There is no 'chart rule' as the Billboard or the OCC has. They simply list the top selling records as per what was reported by labels. Big Hit decided to be all-inclusive for BTS, that's fair play from them. Once we get the full Top 50, we will notice that other Chinese downloads are not accounted for, because as I said there is no audit / fixed methodology. Taylor Swift own sales for 2018 may not appear on this Top 50. That's why we can't "follow IFPI", it's down to each label and we can't count them for one artist and ignore them for someone else. Had the IFPI to set up chart rules, they would logically do the same as the Billboard and every other similar national chart and set a minimum price.
We used 50 because it's slightly over $7, a price that is consistent with both a realistic entry price in other countries and consistent with the size of the Chinese market. As I stated in the past, when we build a model, the objective is to make it meaningful. It's not to pile numbers just like that. If the Chinese market is of the size of Canada, our model must conclude on similar numbers for similar successes in both countries. it's what happens with the model designed here.
Once we look at every metric, the markets on which artists can gain the most EAS are in line with market sizes, the US first, then Japan, the the UK, Germany, France, SK, etc. It's just China that if we stick to a model built as per international standards fails to make sense, simply because it is too different by the absence of both extremes (physical sales and youtube) which creates a huge bulk of cheap streams/downloads. If tomorrow India gets to a similar spot, an appropriate model will be set too in order to keep global numbers meaningful.
It absolutely sounds correct to me that China has more streams and downloads than countries like Australia and Canada. Australia has 25 million citizens, Canada has 37 million citizens. China has 1.4 billion. Why wouldn't we expect a country with a population 56 times bigger than Australia to have more units being moved? I don't see the problem. You say you measure popularity, but it seems to me like you measure revenue more than anything with these adjustments (despite the value of money clearly being different in China vs Australia and Canada). Simply going by popularity, money technically should not matter. A song getting 2 billion streams in China sounds to me like it's more popular than a song getting 50M streams in Canada.
That being said, I'm pretty sure you made a mistake. You say "for Xiami, their share isn’t an issue at all. It’s the good thing with streaming, it’s organic and numbers are insanely high. To use back the example of Tia Ray, her song has 900 million streams on this “tiny” app. It’s massive and easily meaningful enough to make it representative". I would very much like to see where you saw that Be Apart has 900 million streams, that sounds completely ridiculous. It says for me that it's at 87M on Xiami. It's also her only hit. In total, she has 105M streams on the platform. That's far from the 900M you are claiming for Be Apart. In comparison, Taylor Swift has almost four times more total streams on Xiami.
Again, why is it that $2 albums in China are not acceptable, yet you have no problem counting discounted album sales in America like Born This Way which was sold for $0.99?
Hi Karla! Yes, they are all included under the compilation section 🙂
Hi again Samsas!
The huge thing you are missing here is that popularity and price aren't independent notions. With the exact same popularity, the cheapest is the product, the highest is the number. Saying "money technically should not matter" is fundamentally wrong. If 1080p TVs sell way more units than 8K QLED TVs, it's not because people like the more, but simply because they are way cheaper. For that reason, we can't just ignore the real market size of a China. Saying that a stream is a stream no matter what would be the same as saying that an youtube stream should be weighted the same as an apple music stream. If we go that way, then why weighting sales at all? One sale must be one sale, no matter if it's a box, an album, a physical single, or a download. That's the whole meaning of weightings, putting every unit on par, taking off the variable part of the context. Just like a download isn't the same thing as a stream in the US, a stream in the UK isn't the same thing as a stream in China. They do not have the same worth, they are also not used the same way.
I'm not sure you follow the movie industry, but China is now just as big as the US. Movies can gross $500 million there. It's not like we are talking about a poor country, it's the richest in the world. If their market is at the same level as Australia and Canada, it isn't for no reason. As I already said countless times, China will get there. It's only a matter of time before we see Chinese albums among the most popular ones globally and that will be very nice to see. It's just not a reality as of now.
About Be Apart, my bad for the wrong conversion from the automatic translation, I haven't challenge it in her case since I haven't check her CSPC, it's only for the matter of the example though, if you prefer you can look at numbers of her MV to see if Xiami is really as tiny as you claimed. As for the relative popularity of her career to Taylor Swift, it doesn't matter at all. That's the main issue here, your main point is to inflate Taylor stats, not to look at an accurate model. Elseway, you would be concerned about India too.
Hi Chris!
they are very different situations. That was an outlier, and the full price was actually paid by Amazon. Also, the average price of the album once all units are accounted for is standard. You can't put head to head an outlier with a norm. It would be last saying that a random football player is the best of all-time because yesterday he scored two goals while nobody ever averaged that number over a career, that doesn't make sense as you can see.
Hi, thank you for this amazing article!!
I just have an important question!
U said that "At 8, BTS have the most million sellers of the decade, tied with Drake."
Could u plz tell us more informations about this point? I mean, no. Of sales that Drake have? How BTS tied to Drake, or from which point?
I hope u will answer as soon as possible!
Wait... I’m really confused about the Gaon charts. Is it based on the albums sold in South Korea only or is it based on both domestic and international sales?
Hi Maria!
Gaon charts are about units manufactured in South Korea, no matter where they are sold. BTS' label produces all their copies in the SK itself (there has been some minor versions of them in Japan and Taiwan), so their Gaon numbers represent the global sales of these albums. It's all about physical copies though, there is still need to add global downloads to them, which is why figures from the article are always a bit higher.
Will you be using Soribada, Xiami, and AWA to more accurately calculate other artist's sales in future updates?
"the full price was actually paid by Amazon"
And yet you didn't count Rihanna's copies of Anti which were paid by Samsung.
Your "norm" argument also doesn't make sense. It's hardly a norm in China considering only a handful of artists manage to actually get decent and significant album sales anyways. You are saying you have no problem counting an "outlier", and that the problem is when it becomes a norm. Yet in Korea you systematically count 1 CSPC unit as 6.66 singles sold, which sums up to around $2.3 for one unit. And yet again, you have no problem counting this fully. I know you'll probably justify your choice by saying South Korea's music market is bigger, but that barely is the case anymore. They are neck and neck (#6 and #7), so even that argument is slowly falling.
Hi Tommy!
Yes, we are testing what's the best way to come with realistic data for all strong emerging markets without getting into a bottleneck of hundreds of data to be retrieved. We are close to conclude that we will retrieve data for the top tracks of all artists in Genie (replacing Soribada), Xiami and AWA and thanks to them set a weighting proportional to the artist's success in these areas, rather than the fixed Spotify extrapolation.
Hi Chris!
You are once again completely off the mark, a pair of you are so centered into Taylor that you completely miss the real meaning of the data. I explained about SK already several time that the price of a download doesn't matter, what does matter is that it is reflective of a success in a strong market. Since there was virtually no data for album sales (as international artists don't sell there anymore) and their streaming platforms were unaccounted for, sales for ringtones (which used to be huge there), these downloads, no matter how cheap they were, do the job to reflect who's doing well or not. If we had data to account for every format for past years and with specific weightings for the country, we would conclude on similar totals, that is the point.
As for Rihanna, the Samsung copies were then given away, I don't even know how you can compare. It was a situation similar to the ones of Jay-Z and U2. It's the issue with fanatism, people like you try to look at who's biased towards who, while I can't care less about Taylor, Rihanna, Gaga, Jackson, the Beatles, Elvis, Eminem, or Queen when I talk about numbers. They are what they are no matter how much more you like the music of one of them.
Great! Hope you guys find a way to include India's streams numerous streaming services.
