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Now that we defined the Commensurate Sales to Popularity Concept, it is time to apply the method on a concrete example! This first clash will be a 5-way battle between some of the biggest rock acts of all-time: Pink Floyd, Queen, Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith and Bruce Springsteen.
Why do we focus on those five acts? Quite simply because they are responsible for all 10+ million selling studio albums (in absolute terms) issued in 1975. Concerned albums are listed below:
Aerosmith - Toys In The Attic
Bruce Springsteen - Born To Run
Led Zeppelin - Physical Graffiti
Pink Floyd - Wish You Were Here
Queen - A Night At The Opera
A sixth 1975 album sold upper 10 million units. This is ABBA output Greatest Hits. As noted in the introduction yet, in the Commensurate Sales to Popularity Concept sales of hits packages are spread over the original studio albums so they can't appear by themselves on such a study. Let's do the analysis to understand deeply how the concept goes and how it enables to reflect much better which albums are the most successful than simple untreated raw data of album sales.
First, we will focus on this latter raw data, setting how much each of those five monster albums sold. Second, we will check sales of each track from those albums on each format - physical, digital and streaming - and weight them to value those figures on a par with album sales. Third, where the concept fully shows its strength, we will study sales of each long format - live album, compilation, music video - which contain tracks of those original albums to attribute their sales into the original proportionally to the impact of those tracks on it. Sounds complicated? Not that much, you just need to read upcoming pages with concrete examples to understand completely the method.
So, which album out of the five mentioned previously is the biggest? Any idea? Let's define the answer.
Original Albums Sales
Aerosmith - Toys In The Attic
- America
- US - 8,600,000
- Canada - 550,000
- Argentina - N/A
- Asia
- Japan - 200,000
- Oceania
- Australia - N/A
- New Zealand - N/A
- Europe - N/A
- UK - N/A
- France - 150,000
- Germany - N/A
- Italy - N/A
- Spain - N/A
- Sweden - N/A
- Netherland - N/A
- Switzerland - N/A
- Austria - N/A
- Finland - N/A
- World - 10,500,000
Bruce Springsteen - Born To Run
- America
- US - 6,700,000
- Canada - 650,000
- Argentina - N/A
- Asia
- Japan - 300,000
- Oceania
- Australia - 200,000
- New Zealand - 30,000
- Europe - 2,510,000
- UK - 650,000
- France - 160,000
- Germany - N/A
- Italy - 260,000
- Spain - 200,000
- Sweden - 200,000
- Netherland - 130,000
- Switzerland - N/A
- Austria - N/A
- Finland - 45,000
- World - 11,200,000
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Led Zeppelin - Physical Graffiti
- America
- US - 8,450,000
- Canada - 850,000
- Argentina - 100,000
- Asia
- Japan - 360,000
- Oceania
- Australia - 230,000
- New Zealand - 45,000
- Europe - 2,515,000
- UK - 775,000
- France - 220,000
- Germany - 425,000
- Italy - 260,000
- Spain - 175,000
- Sweden - N/A
- Netherland - 75,000
- Switzerland - 40,000
- Austria - 35,000
- Finland - N/A
- World - 13,400,000
Pink Floyd - Wish You Were Here
- America
- US - 8,100,000
- Canada - 1,100,000
- Argentina - 255,000
- Asia
- Japan - 525,000
- Oceania
- Australia - 520,000
- New Zealand - 80,000
- Europe - 11,125,000
- UK - 1,875,000
- France - 1,430,000
- Germany - 2,500,000
- Italy - 1,200,000
- Spain - 900,000
- Sweden - 200,000
- Netherland - 260,000
- Switzerland - 250,000
- Austria - 175,000
- Finland - N/A
- World - 23,100,000
Queen - A Night At The Opera
- America
- US - 3,800,000
- Canada - 525,000
- Argentina - 300,000
- Asia
- Japan - 700,000
- Oceania
- Australia - 300,000
- New Zealand - 80,000
- Europe - 4,530,000
- UK - 1,575,000
- France - 300,000
- Germany - 700,000
- Italy - 170,000
- Spain - 330,000
- Sweden - 125,000
- Netherland - 360,000
- Switzerland - 125,000
- Austria - 60,000
- Finland - 40,000
- World - 11,700,000
Original Album Sales - Comments
01 Pink Floyd - Wish You Were Here - 23,100,000
02 Led Zeppelin - Physical Graffiti - 13,400,000
03 Queen - A Night At The Opera - 11,700,000
04 Bruce Springsteen - Born To Run - 11,200,000
05 Aerosmith - Toys In The Attic - 10,500,000
As you can easily notice, Wish You Were Here is by very far the most successful album of the pack while the remaining albums are close to each other with Physical Graffiti leading the pack. Wait! That's wrong. As explained in the introduction of the CSPC, best sellers and most successful are different subjects.
Wish You Were Here faced no compilation album of Pink Floyd until Echoes was released in 2001 and that one hasn't sold that much. Physical Graffiti competition came in 1990 with Remasters, which hasn't sold too much either. In the other side, A Night At The Opera generated tons of greatest hits sales from 1980. So did hits from Toys In The Attic, from 1980 as well with Greatest Hits release. Bruce Springsteen album Born To Run is a bit in-between as it was covered only by Live 1975-85 released in 1986 and Greatest Hits from 1995, both competing the studio album quite late but both sold solid amounts.
Singles-wise, only Queen had a true big hit with Bohemian Rhapsody, and on a minor scale Aerosmith with Walk This Way. Pink Floyd set had no physical single released at all, facilitating its album sales.
From the next pages we will see how much all different releases and formats impact the view of those albums popularity. The point is not to get lost into too many figures nor to stick on technicalities so I'll be using rough numbers without getting into all details.
Physical Singles Sales
Aerosmith - Toys In The Attic
Sweet Emotion - 400,000 units
Walk This Way - 800,000 units
Album equivalent - 360,000
Bruce Springsteen - Born To Run
Born To Run - 800,000 units
Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out - 100,000 units
Album equivalent - 210,000
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Led Zeppelin - Physical Graffiti
Trampled Under Foot - 400,000
Album equivalent - 120,000
Pink Floyd - Wish You Were Here
No single released.
Album equivalent - 0
Queen - A Night At The Opera
Bohemian Rhapsody - 6,400,000 units
You're My Best Friend - 1,200,000 units
Love Of My Life - 400,000 units
Album equivalent - 2,400,000
Digital Singles Sales
Aerosmith - Toys In The Attic
Sweet Emotion - 1,500,000 units
Walk This Way - 2,000,000 units
Remaining tracks - 500,000 units
Album equivalent - 400,000
Bruce Springsteen - Born To Run
Born To Run - 1,600,000 units
Thunder Road - 800,000 units
Remaining tracks - 800,000 units
Album equivalent - 320,000
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Led Zeppelin - Physical Graffiti
Kashmir - 2,000,000 units
Remaining tracks - 1,500,000 units
Album equivalent - 350,000
Pink Floyd - Wish You Were Here
Wish You Were Here - 3,000,000 units
Remaining tracks - 2,000,000 units
Album equivalent - 500,000
Queen - A Night At The Opera
Bohemian Rhapsody - 7,000,000 units
You're My Best Friend - 1,500,000 units
Remaining tracks - 1,200,000 units
Album equivalent - 970,000
Streaming Sales
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 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 it is now the norm in the new industry model.
A Night At The Opera album by Queen ends up well ahead of all other albums with almost twice as many streaming as remaining albums. It may be argued that it is barely thanks to the out of this world results of Bohemian Rhapsody. The fact is that removing the biggest hit of all those albums, A Night At The Opera still impressively remains the biggest of all.
The hierarchy among albums is not the same at all as the one shown on album sales. Wish You Were Here is the strongest seller but only #3 here, A Night At The Opera reverses both positions. Physical Graffiti goes from #2 in sales to #5 and last in streaming, the opposite of Toys In The Attic. Only Bruce Springsteen Born To Run by chance ends up #4 in both sides. Following pages will reveal why those listings are so much different.
Full Lenght related records Sales
Aerosmith - Toys In The Attic
Following table lists all relevant records which contain tracks originally released on Toys In The Attic 1975 album. Green records are Live albums, grey ones are Compilations while orange items are Music Videos, with all formats considered (VHS, DVD, Blu-Ray etc.).
How to understand this table? If you check for example Greatest Hits line, those figures mean the 1980 compilation sold 13 million units worldwide. The second statistics column means all versions of all songs included on this package add for nearly 190 million streaming plays on Spotify as of May 6th 2016.
The third column showing 105 million represents the number of streaming plays on Spotify by songs of Toys In The Attic featured on Greatest Hits compilation. This 10-tracks hits package indeed contains both Sweet Emotion and Walk This Way which are two of the three main attraction on the record along with 1971 single Dream On. Thus, streaming figures tell us Toys In The Attic songs are responsible for 55% of the Greatest Hits tracklist attractiveness, which means it generated almost 7,2 million of its 13 million sales.
Using the same method for all those records concludes on a massive 13,6 million full lenght records sold on the back of Toys In The Attic, more than what the album sold by itself. This highlights how much of an error it is to focus solely on the original album results.
Bruce Springsteen - Born To Run
In each category - Live album, compilation, Music video - Bruce Springsteen started with a strong seller. Then various items have been released with rather close release dates not enabling subsequent records to accumulate many sales before being replaced.
Obviously the main album of the boss is Born In The USA rather than Born To Run, which explains why the share of this latter albums on his compilations isn't that big. It may seem unfair to Born To Run to see its share reduced because of the success of an other album, but it is where this method is incredibly powerful. In fact, had Born In The USA never existed, share of Born To Run would be bigger but it will be bigger on a smaller pie as compilations wouldn't have sold so much and the result would have been roughly the same.
In total, those records sold a rounded 7,6 million units thanks to Born To Run tracks, mostly the title track and Thunder Road.
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Led Zeppelin - Physical Graffiti
With this example of Led Zeppelin you should start really understanding the huge lie in catalog album sales. In fact, Physical Graffiti hits are nowhere near as big as Toys In The Attic hits for example - Walk This Way has more streaming than all songs combined of the double album Physical Graffiti. If Led Zeppelin original album is on par sales-wise with Aerosmith set it is only thanks to the way Atlantic label decided to exploit the album by focusing mostly on the original albums rather than through compilations.
The main point to notice is that the oldest record on this list is from 1990, a huge 15 years after Physical Graffiti which thus faced no competition for a very long time.
All in all, Physical Graffiti songs, led by Kashmir, generated a relatively modest 2,7 million sales of subsequent full length records.
Pink Floyd - Wish You Were Here
In a similar way to Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd rarely relied on compilation albums. The few they released did get relevant sales and Wish You Were Here tracks, most notably the title track, largely helped them. Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Part 1-5) is also included on all those albums, plus Have A Cigar on A Foot In The Door, which represents half of the original album as Wish You Were Here only contains six songs.
Although A Collection Of Great Dance Songs was released in 1981, only six years after the original album, it wasn't a proper album, issued with no promotion at all, which enabled the 70s records to keep their strenght well alive.
The total is pretty solid considering how few releases emerged as tracks of Wish You Were Here created 8,8 million sales of other full length records.
Queen - A Night At The Opera
It may seem surprising to see A Night At The Opera at the same level of the other albums of this study as it is Queen classic album, while the other four are all second to some other album or even lower in the artists respective discographies.
This album obviously includes the juggernaut Bohemian Rhapsody, one of the very biggest hits of all-time. You're My Best Friend is also a notable hit, Love Of My Life too is quite a decent hit.
Not only the band 1980 Greatest Hits album sold well over 30 million, it did so with 26% of its attractiveness coming from A Night At The Opera singles. Adding most of the other full length records issued with its songs - some more are missing, including local releases but are nearly impossible to track - bring a gigantic cumulative tally of 18,25 million full length records sold thanks to the 1975 studio album.
1975 Monster Rock Albums CSPC Results
So, after checking all figures, what's the most successful album from 1975? Well, at this point we barely need to do the addition of all equivalent album sales!
In the following table, all categories display figures that way, e.g. in equivalent album sales. For example, A Night At The Opera singles released in physical format sold the equivalent of 2,4 million albums - 8 million singles with a 10 to 3 weighting.
This is it! Once everything is considered, it appears Queen classic album A Night At The Opera comes on top, barely edging out Pink Floyd set Wish You Were Here. Aerosmith album Toys In The Attic is also fairly strong, largely downgraded on most all-time sales lists.
This last table also fully validates our CSPC approach. In fact, the most revolutionary part is adding shares of 'other releases' into sales of the original album, which may seem debatable for some. If one checks carefully this last table, he will notice how the Streaming ranking of those albums (1/ Queen ; 2/ Aerosmith ; 3/ Pink Floyd ; 4/ Bruce Springsteen ; 5/ Led Zeppelin) is very exactly the ranking of those albums in terms of additional generated sales through other releases. Coincidence? Obviously not. This just goes on to prove how much this method better reflects the real popularity of the original studio albums rather than their own sales alone.
The disappointment comes from Led Zeppelin. Despite being the second best seller in the original album format, the album is nowhere near the others overall with less than half the CSPC sales of A Night At The Opera. Considering the album is well behind Led Zeppelin own albums II or IV, this result appears to be fairly natural, making much more sense than the raw data initially represented by album sales.
As usual, feel free to comment and / or ask a question!
Sources: IFPI, Spotify, Chartmasters.org.
Thank you, Guillaume!
I understand why it took so long, the most difficult part is, of course, checking the Spotify's numbers and calculate the percentages. I wish it was easier to do that.
And course, proud that Queen won the battle, haha.
Hello Hernán!
Definitely a long work, the Excel sheet with Spotify numbers alone has 6332 cells that are not null, all manually entered - and that's only one out of the 14 sheets I created for this article! The percentages imply we need to study the tracklist of each live and compilation album and to search for each song on original albums and flag them, thus making writting Spotify numbers almost the easier part hehe
It was a tough battle between Pink Floyd and Queen, at some point I'll do it for artists entire discographies and merge all results to establish comprehensive lists. It will give back some justice to band like Queen that sold well with both studio albums and compilations 🙂
Thanks!
The only thing I'm not sure about, for future battles, is if there is any possible formula to wigtht the way some discographies are structured. You made that point several times about Pink Floyd not releasing a truly official compilation until 2001 (just like Metallica or AC/DC not releasing one ever), and therefore benefitting from more spread sales given that all their essential songs were split in various albums. That was opposed to what the likes of Michael Jackson or Queen did where you could own all the vital songs with 1-2 compilation.
Basically, Queen and Michael Jackson are likely to have about 15-20 essential tracks each and these 15-20 tracks are overall more popular than the essential tracks by Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, Metallica, etc. Yet, considering how the latter structured their catalogues, they made it imperative to buy 4-6 studio albums to own all the key tracks, while 1-2 were necessary for Michael Jackson or Queen. To me, it is clear these two are bigger than the above bands, even if it isn't totally reflected (or not to the right dimension) in all time albums sales.
How can that be solved without looking at Spotify?
Well, I'm afraid even this point must be answered using Spotify numbers! The issue you bring out is fully valid. I'll pick up the three biggest catalog acts on Spotify - Michael Jackson, Queen and the Beatles.
Jackson / If one buys The Essential, he buys tracks adding for 80,16% of the popularity of his catalog. Once you bought it, no other album represents more than 2% of his catalog with the tracks not already present on The Essential. Obviously, one sale is enough to own his catalog, not even mentioning that the huge majority of people listening to the remaining 19,84% of tracks also listen to the in 80%, thus the songs out of The Essential generate very, very few sales.
Queen / Greatest Hits covers 56,93% of their catalog popularity while Greatest Hits II covers 24,75% of it. Just like Michael Jackson, none of their studio albums once you bought those hits packages add for more than 2% of their catalog popularity, so they will be creating very little sales too. The genius idea of their label was to release an independent Greatest Hits II album, just imagine how their discography sales would be truncated by a good 15 million if it was a 2CD package containing Greatest Hits with the deletion of that one.
The Beatles / One 2000 compilation despite having 27 songs avoid many of their biggest hits, thus covering only 42,45% of their catalog. Once you bought it, their is still 4 albums with 6 to 11% of their catalog popularity (the expected ones, e.g. Abbey Road, White Album, Sgt Peppers and Rubber Soul) and 5 more albums account for 3 to 6% of their popularity. Each of those 9 albums tracks outside 'One' add at least as many weekly streams as Beat It, a song that has 95 million total streams. It means that if Beat It is enough of a hit to justify the buying of an album, and obviously it is, then 9 studio Beatles remain mandatory buying's even after picking up One! Interestingly, had 'One' been a 2CD, 54 tracks set instead of a single CD album, it would have cover 67,32% of their catalog and only the White Album would have remained a relevant album as all others are down to less than 4% of their catalog attractiveness.
No doubt I'll be posting articles on the same to weight appropriately sales of all acts!
Spotify is a vital part of any sales work at the moment. I must admit I wasn't sure when you first mentioned how it makes things easier in several aspects, I think I didn't get it. But now I realize it is probably a purer way to calculate popularity and compare different acts, and in this case not just for how they structured their catalogue but also when acts come from different eras, were huge in different parts of the world, their discographies have a different size, etc. All that doesn't matter much with Spotify and similar. Which is very good.
Michael Jackson is the perfect example, but acts like Queen, Bob Marley, Guns N Roses, etc. also get revalued with Spotify!
Very interesting article! Strong result from Queen topping Floyd!
One question. Did you include Run DMC's 1986 cover version of Walk This Way in your Spotify analysis? I know it featured Steven Tyler and Joe Perry as guests on vocals/guitars, but one could argue it is an orphan track in the Aerosmith catalog. The cover does not appear on either Toys in the Attic (1975) or Greatest Hits (1980). It does appear on latter compilations like Essential Aerosmith, along with the original version of the song.
Regards, Thomas
