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It is hard to believe its been five years since Amy Winehouse passed away. The definitive shooting star. The personality of the Jazz singer was so unique that she printed an indelible mark in the history of music culture.
Her discography as of today is made up of three albums from a purely technical point of view. In reality, her debut album Frank went mostly unnoticed when first released in 2003, except in the UK where it sold a few copies. Her last album Lioness: Hidden Treasures is a posthumous cash-in including some new, albeit unfinished, songs. Thus, it is really all about Back To Black, a cult 2006 album that broke the main audience the following year and never really left airwaves and charts since.
The difficulty with such an iconic artist is to distinguish the popularity of the artist and the popularity of the personality. An iconic act doesn't necessarily mean huge seller. The Velvet Underground can tell you a bit about that. Our aim today is to establish the popularity Amy thanks to the CSPC method.
As a reminder we'll be using the usual method, merging every format sales an artist has been getting and attributing them to respective studio albums. We will start by focusing on raw data, setting out how much each album sold. Then, we will check sales of each track from those albums in each format – physical, digital and streaming – and weight them to value those figures on a par with album sales. To complete the study, we will study sales of the compilations, live albums and music videos they released. Once all the raw data is set we will only need to apply appropriate weighting to get the overall picture of Amy Winehouse's career results.
Let's go!
Original Albums Sales
Frank (2003)
- America
- US - 430,000
- Canada - 55,000
- Argentina - N/A
- Brazil - 105,000
- Mexico - N/A
- Asia
- Japan - N/A
- Oceania
- Australia - 55,000
- New Zealand - 10,000
- Europe - 2,760,000
- UK - 1,175,000
- France - 315,000
- Germany - 400,000
- Italy - 130,000
- Spain - 110,000
- Sweden - 20,000
- Netherland - 100,000
- Switzerland - 60,000
- Austria - 40,000
- Finland - N/A
- World - 3,600,000
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Back To Black (2006)
- America
- US - 3,250,000
- Canada - 450,000
- Argentina - 60,000
- Brazil - 410,000
- Mexico - N/A
- Asia
- Japan - 280,000
- Oceania
- Australia - 280,000
- New Zealand - 55,000
- Europe - 9,910,000
- UK - 3,825,000
- France - 1,325,000
- Germany - 1,475,000
- Italy - 500,000
- Spain - 375,000
- Sweden - 80,000
- Netherland - 335,000
- Switzerland - 240,000
- Austria - 165,000
- Finland - 40,000
- World - 14,900,000
Lioness: Hidden Treasures (2011)
- America
- US - 525,000
- Canada - 70,000
- Argentina - N/A
- Brazil - 50,000
- Mexico - N/A
- Asia
- Japan - 25,000
- Oceania
- Australia - 60,000
- New Zealand - 20,000
- Europe - 2,120,000
- UK - 900,000
- France - 300,000
- Germany - 250,000
- Italy - 100,000
- Spain - 80,000
- Sweden - 15,000
- Netherland - 75,000
- Switzerland - 50,000
- Austria - 25,000
- Finland - 5,000
- World - 3,000,000
Original Album Sales - Comments
2003 Frank – 3,600,000
2006 Back To Black – 14,900,000
2011 Lioness: Hidden Treasures – 3,000,000
Both Frank and Lioness: Hidden Treasures sold mostly on the back of the fan base built up by the Back To Black album, so it is fairly logical to see them with similar up to date sales.
Now, Back To Black. 14,9 million album sales in our day and age is obviously a gigantic tally. As it keeps going strong this figure is poised to climb even more. For this album, and about Amy Winehouse overall, it is important to check how her sales are spread.
In fact, while 14,9 million puts the album in the second half of the all-time Top 200 best selling albums, in Europe sales of this record are seriously closing in on 10 million units. With 10+ weeks at #1 and 150+ weeks in the Top 100 in most countries there, Back To Black features just under the Top 10 best selling studio albums ever in the region.
Elsewhere, former golden markets like the US, Canada or Australia were surprisingly not that good for Amy. In Brazil she was absolutely massive, in Japan terribly weak. This is what happens with a personality so strong that it may not really fit into a country's culture, and as a result it will be difficult for the artist to sell relevant amounts there.
Physical Singles Sales
With a low market and the profile of an album seller, Amy Winehouse's physical sales are pretty low at barely over 600,000 units overall. Valerie sold more than half that figure benefiting from the fact the Mark Ronson version wasn't a part of the original album.
As a reminder, the weighting is done with a 10 to 3 ratio between one album and one physical single.
Frank (2003) - 5,000 equivalent albums
Stronger Than Me
Take The Box
In My Bed / You Sent Me Flying
Pumps / Help Yourself
= 15,000 units combined
Back To Black (2006) - 180,000 equivalent albums
Rehab - 100,000
Valerie - 350,000
You Know I'm No Good
Back To Black
Tears Dry On Their Own
Love Is A Losing Game
= 150,000 units combined
Digital Singles Sales
Unlike the likes of Adele, Coldplay or Lady Gaga that enjoyed some of the biggest selling albums of the last 10 years, Amy Winehouse's singles failed to become major sellers. As incredible as may seem, Valerie apart, she never had a Top 5 single in the UK, in the US, in Germany, in France etc. In Australia, she never managed to get a Top 25 hit.
Still, the digital market was booming in 2007/2008 and her singles, just like her albums, lived much longer than their chart runs suggest. All songs from Back To Black end up with fairly decent sales totals in the downloads format. It brings the singer a comprehensive total of 19,8 million digital singles sold.
As a reminder, the weighting is done with a 10 to 1,5 ratio between one album and one digital single.
Frank (2003) - 270,000 equivalent albums
Remaining Tracks - 1,800,000
Back To Black (2006) - 2,580,000 equivalent albums
Rehab - 4,400,000
You Know I'm No Good - 2,000,000
Back To Black - 3,200,000
Tears Dry On Their Own - 1,400,000
Love Is A Losing Game - 900,000
Valerie - 3,500,000
Remaining Tracks - 1,800,000
Lioness: Hidden Treasures (2011) - 120,000 equivalent albums
Body And Soul - 200,000
Our Day Will Come - 200,000
Remaining Tracks - 400,000
Streaming Sales
The below table lists Spotify streaming of all songs from the five albums we are studying. The Comprehensive Streaming is reached by multiplying Spotify figures by 68/26. In fact, https://www.ifpi.org/downloads/GMR2016.pd f" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">as shown in the IFPI 2015 Report, there were 68 million paying subscribers to all streaming platforms by the end of 2015. While the exact count of Spotify paying subscribers by the end of 2015 is unknown, that figure reached 20 million in June 2015 and 30 million in March 2016, thus an estimated 26 million is used as of the end of 2015.
The equivalent album sales is the division of the comprehensive streaming figure by 1500 as is now the norm in the new industry model.
Unsurprisingly, Back To Black occupies the large majority of Amy Winehouse's streaming air time. Just put it this way - only the biggest song of Frank tops the weakest album track of Back To Black's original track list.
The latter album is incredibly consistent, as while no song is higher than 113 million streams, which is still a superb result, no original song is lower than 13 million. Added tracks to the deluxe edition all break the 5 million criteria too. The equivalent album sales of this record crosses the million barrier. In spite of this, it may come as a surprise to notice this figure is lower than albums like Coldplay's Mylo Xyloto, Eminem's The Eminem Show, or Lady Gaga's The Fame.
Full Length related records Sales
As 2/3 CDs packages of her individual albums have been added directly to her original albums tally, the full length related records of Amy Winehouse are limited to a few live sets, mostly in DVD format.
How to understand this table? If you check for example At The BBC line, those figures mean it sold 150,000 units worldwide which includes all formats. The second statistics column means all versions of all songs included on this package add for 400 million streaming plays on Spotify as of September 7 2016.
The second part on the right of the table shows how many streams are coming from each original album, plus the share it represents on the overall package streams. Thus, streaming figures tell us Back To Black songs are responsible for 91% of the At The BBC track list attractiveness, which means it generated 136,000 of its 150,000 sales and so on for the other records.
Once again, Back To Black is the clear leader among sales generators in all her secondary releases.
AMy Winehouse Career CSPC Results
So, after checking all the figures, you must be looking for how many overall equivalent album sales each Amy Winehouse record achieved. Well, at this point we barely need to do the addition of all the figures defined in this article!
In the following table, all categories display figures that way, e.g. in equivalent album sales. For example, Back To Black singles released in download format sold the equivalent of 2,580,000 albums - 17,200,000 downloads with a 10 to 1,5 weighting ratio.
As a reminder:
- Studio Album: sales of the original album
- Other Releases: sales of compilations generated thanks to the album
- Physical Singles: sales of physical singles from the album (ratio 3/10)
- Download Singles: sales of digital singles from the album (ratio 1,5/10)
- Streaming: equivalent album sales of all the album tracks (ratio 1/1500)
Just like with her album sales there are two ways to see Amy Winehouse's CSPC results. On the one hand, 19,8 million equivalent album sales for Back To Black is amazing, undoubtedly one of the most successful albums of the last 10 years. On the other hand, this studio album total represents a share of 72,5% of the CSPC total, which puts some shade over the other albums. Indeed, Back To Black catalog sales have been unreal in recent years not only because of the album appeal, but also because most of the Amy's appeal is focused only on one record, in one format. Also, its sales being achieved mostly in a limited set of countries make those catalog sales all the more visible.
In total, Amy Winehouse sold 27,3 million equivalent album sales, a result that is nevertheless outstanding considering she really only had one album era in her career.
Do not forget to check our amazing lists posted inside the CSPC: Data Collector which includes the full listing of all CSPC results compiled so far to better gauge her position in the history of the music industry.
As usual, feel free to comment and / or ask a question!
Sources: IFPI, Spotify, Universal, Chartmasters.org.
Amy Winehouse remainds me a lot of Janis Joplin, the queen of the blues.. And Amy said, Janis was her favorite singer. I would love to see Janis Joplin's CSPC.
