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Hi MJD
coldplays sales are super impressive, although slightly short of Taylor and Rihanna but their touring power seems a lot stronger than their SPS. Considering they’ve had 500 million tours without an extreme amount of dates. What do you think is the best sales metric to generally predict touring success?
When you say predict, do you mean trying to gauge how successful a future, as yet unplanned or announced tour would be?
Personally, I think there are too many unknown variables to be able to gauge that, such as ticket price, venues size, length/amount of dates etc and how do you define success? Amount of sold out shows, overall gross, overall attendance?
Even trying to measure the success of historical tours is problematic, as you are not measuring like for like. For instance, pretty much every Led Zeppelin tour/show in the 70s was sold out, but due to inflation, ticket prices going crazy, far longer tours, better global logistics etc they pale in comparison, in attendance and gross, to tours/shows from say the 90s. A relatively popular 90s act, could fail to sell out any tour or any show and still return a higher overall attendance and gross.
More like predict their overall touring capacity I suppose.
There are cases of artists booking too few shows or booking too small shows or not meeting demand in various markets of course. But most major artists today have had tours that showcase their capability at their peak. Rihanna’s DWT, Taylor’s reputation tour and Coldplay’s a head full of dreams tour for example. I think those three cases definitely maximised demand.
The thing is, 9 of the top 10 grossing tours ever, those by U2, Guns N Roses, The Rolling Stones (x2), Coldplay, Roger Waters, AC/DC, Metallica and Madonna, were all set when they were way past their actual peaks. Only Sheerans tour was set at his peak.
Coldplay's A head Full of Dreams tour gross 523 million with a 122 total tour dates while Taylor's Reputation 345.7 million gross covers only 53 dates. So obviously the number of shows deflates her total gross. I am not sure about Rihanna. But I believe Rihanna has a massive amounts of casual listeners and not as much as die hard fans like Taylor & Coldplay does. That is probably why she sold ridiculous amount of downloads & streaming, while not as many as Taylor or Coldplay when it comes to album sales. In my opinion die hard fans are more willing to spend on buying albums, while casual fans would just buy your digital singles or stream your music. Obviously to fill up a stadium and to charge high price ticket you needed die hard fans that are willing to pay for that. My claim on Rihanna is just a wild guess, I could be wrong.
If Taylor only tours in the anglosphere that's her problem 😉 Coldplay tour everywhere, therefore they make more money.
Uhmm not saying that one is better than the other or not. Just saying that number of dates played a role in terms of gross ticket sales. If u have more dates, you are more likely to get higher ticket sales. Not sure what u are trying to get at here.
You make it sound like if Taylor had more dates she would have made as much/more money than Coldplay which is obviously not true... Coldplay's tour was more successful because they have more global appeal.
She probably would. Because she didnt ever tour Asia except for Japan. In which she had massive following there. Anyway im not even her fan. Just saying, she toured less and her gross are less largely because of she did a minor tour compared to Coldplay. She probably would have gross more if she add more US dates and tour more in Asia & Europe. And u cant deny that.
Hi Jazz!
The number of dates isn't a very good indicator actually to know how much a tool was 'milked'. The number of cities would be more relevant.
For example, Taylor brought 143,427 people and $12,214,933 in 2 nights on Wembley Stadium. Coldplay did 303,985 and $28,810,200 with 4 nights. Should we deduce Coldplay are 10-20% bigger as averages suggest, or more than twice bigger, as totals suggest? The good answer is the latter. Had enough demand been there to make a 3rd night as profitable as the remaining 2 for Taylor, a show would have been added. Same for a 5th Coldplay night.
In the other side, Taylor did 100,109 tickets and $14,859,847 in the Tokyo Dome in 2 shows, while Coldplay did 42,817 and $6,513,740 in 1 night.
It's no coincidence if the average of the one with the most nights is higher, it's because the demand was higher thus more nights were set up.
If we look at the Reputation Tour, it had many countries where she didn't go (non-English speaking EU countries, Latin America, Asia besides Japan, etc). In Germany, she grossed only $2 million in 2 nights during the 1989 Tour, $1.1 million in Scotland, $800k in the Netherlands, and no date at all in France, Italy or Spain, which suggest results would have been lower. That's why no date was date, the shows wouldn't have been profitable enough considering the costs of the tour.
She improved her results in most cities in common from 1989 to Reputation (for example $10 to $14 million in Tokyo, $24 to $26 million in Oceania, $8.7 to $11.1 million in Toronto), but not that much. All cities she removed during the Reputation tour are cities where she grossed from $800k to $2 million or less per night during the 1989 tour.
With 69 more dates (to get to 122 total) in places where she used to average about $1.4 million per night, and considering that she improved her raw worth by about 20% between both tours, we can go on with $1.7 million per night. That's an extra $117.3 million gross, or $463 million in total, $60 million less than Coldplay.
Of course we can say a 3rd show on Wembley would have brought in more than $1.7 million, there would be possibilities to maximize this number, but the same is true for Coldplay and for every tour.
Thus, while the number of shows seem to indicate Taylor would have crush results of Coldplay with more dates, the truth isn't that straight forward.
Between the lines in this answer there is the solution I would use to answer Fanofpop question. How to know the maximum of an look ? Taking the max he/she did in every area through different tours, like at how much the artist grew between each tour, and apply this increase to the last known results from each area. That would give a supposed maximum gross if an artist tours everywhere. If there's countries where an artist has never gone, simply assume he's not popular enough to make relevant money from there.
A last thing, just like with record sales, we tend to believe the industry wants artists to maximize the gross of their tours. It's not true. They want to maximize profits instead. If Taylor was paid more for the Reputation tour (which is very likely), hence why $1 million shows weren't good enough anymore in 2018, while Ed Sheeran with an intimate show and a profile that wasn't so strong when the Divide tour started was able to pull 250+ profitable shows.
Actually I was just trying to make a point that tour doesnt neccesarily reflects an artists popularity because the original comments was asking how is it possible that Coldplay, Rihanna, Taylor could have similar sales but Coldplay have far bigger gross. To me touring is not a good inducator of popularity. Because there is too many factors that will influence your results. Based on your explaination it shows that touring are largely determined by purchasing powers. Which explains why older generations artists who have older fanbase and bigger purchasing power always outgross even the younger more relevant ones. I also it depends on how many loyal fans you have vs somebody who doesnt really have as many loyal fan but have large amount of casual fans. I didnt mean to try to diss Coldplay ir anything.
No worries, it isn't how it was interpreted either! My main point was is that it feels instictively natural to weight overall gross with the number of shows but that leads to very misleading conclusions. You are absolutely right in that tour grosses favor artists popular among a richer/older population, as well as benefitting artists with more dedicated fans. That's why teen acts and rock legends tend to do relatively speaking much better than crossover pop stars.
"All cities she removed during the Reputation tour are cities where she grossed from $800k to $2 million or less per night during the 1989 tour. With 69 more dates (to get to 122 total) in places where she used to average about $1.4 million per night, and considering that she improved her raw worth by about 20% between both tours, we can go on with $1.7 million per night. That’s an extra $117.3 million gross, or $463 million in total, $60 million less than Coldplay."
Where would these "69 more dates" be though ? In countries she's never been to ? This $1.4 million average from the 1989 tour was in countries like Germany ($1 million) or China ($2 million), obviously the average in the rest of the world would be much lower, for example she had much more success in Germany than in the rest of mainland Europe.
Hi Analord!
Entirely agree, I was portraying an already favorable situation to show that even on these conditions she wouldn't have been ahead of Coldplay. She would have been able to find a good amount of $1.7m nights in more US cities or more dates in her very best cities, but it's not granted at all that she would have got 69 more. Especially true since when you add 2 dates on Wembley for example, people are wiling to pay less since the offer may outnumber the demand, at the end you don't necessarily make much more money from 4 nights instead of 2.
Hello MJD! Is there any way you could share the digital sales numbers from US with me? Even a small top 10/20 of best selling songs would make me happy already. I'm trying to estimate Coldplay's units there since they're ridiculously undercertified because of some weird involuntary label switch that happened when Warner bought Parlophone Records from EMI back in 2011.
Hi MJD! I counted the pure album sales and compilation sales separately on their tables and they make up for 60,160,000 and 5,598,000 respectively. This means the worldwide total should be at 65,758,000 instead of the 64,275,000 in the combined result. Then I went to the automatically updated table and the numbers together are 65,769,000. So... which one is correct? I would also like to tell you that The Blue Room and Trouble - Norwegian Live are EPs, not singles. As for Safety, aside from being an EP, it only had 50 copies available in stores, while Mince Spies and Remixes, which you didn't included, had limited releases of 1,000 units each. You also forgot the Global Citizen EP, they released it under the name Los Unidades.
Hi MJD, I've stumbled across some news from 2012 saying that Mylo Xyloto has 8 million copies sold worldwide, that's before the streaming era, so why does here it only has 6.3 million pures copies? The same goes for Ghost Stories which is reported to have 3.7 million sales. It's genuinely a doubt, I'm not trying to discredit your work in any way.
https://archive.ph/Y9BRO
https://web.archive.org/web/20150623005604/ http://www.ifpi.org/downloads/Digital-Music-Report-2015.pdf
Hi Swiftclocks!
Both links are fairly different. The first is a simple claim from a jornalist, there are millions like that. They may work for popular magazines, most of them are no chart and sales experts and simply repeat what they see elsewhere. MX definitely came nowhere near to 8 million to date, let alone by 2012.
The second is completely different, that's the IFPI report which did list GS at 3.7 million units for the year 2014. There are two specificities through, the main one is that these are shipment figures. While Ghost Stories didn't came during the last quarter (when there are most of overshipment cases), they did came back from 5 super selling albums, so Ghost Stories naturally shipped millions upon release. The 3.7 million figure is a picture of net shipments at Dec 31, nothing tells if there have been new copies shipped afterwards, or instead more copies returned than new copies sent. Considering the data from each market, which is very well tracked for them with next to no margin of error, it was safe enough to assume the later case for this release. I won't say that I remember the details as I studied many more albums since then, but what's safe is that the IFPI numbers are always a starting point and when the final numbers contradict them it's because there are more than enough evidence that returns happened.
Another case is when numbers reported from labels to the IFPI are wrong, which is more and more common as years pass. While they explicitely say numbers exclude streams, all it grants is that they asked labels to send them numbers without streams, it doesn't grant that labels did send them numbers without streams. It's a fundamental difference!
Thanks! I have another question, why did the streaming sales for Music of the Spheres are no longer being showed? And where do you get their YouTube views total? Do you check them one by one?
Hello! I wanted to take action on something I'm very sure of, also seeing the first three Coldplay albums in my opinion Eminem, Robbie Williams and Coldplay are the biggest artists globally in the 00s, seeing singers like Usher, Alicia keys, Justin Timberlake they seem to have sold almost exclusively in America, an example are Robbie Williams' best-selling album and Coldplay they seem to have sold less than Usher's best-selling album, but in my opinion RW and Coldplay albums remain better for their extreme global sales, I wanted to know yours opinion, mine is that selling 10 million worldwide is much better than selling 20 million in America alone
20 million as a whole will generate more revenue than a 10 million selling album. So no selling 20 million in usa is much better. There is reason robbie williams wanted to crack america . Whereas american artists will be still happy with american success. Taylor was local for many years, but made so much money fron usa alone. That share of american market revenue is way huge.. Anyways coldplay cracked America!
how are bts weak on streaming when they were in the top 10 of the most streamed artists on 2021 on spotify? half of their sales come from streaming
Pretty safe to say MOTS surpassed Everyday Life at this point. When are you updating their pure/digital sales and streaming formula MJD? My Universe and Yellow (which went viral on TikTok) definitely increased their streaming/catalogue powers.
