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Thanks MJD for the feedback. I dont agree with your grounds regarding Spirits but they are valid and you could have a point. I was very surprised though with the great sales of singles Staying Alive, Night Fever Tragedy and Too Much Heaven. Besides the sales of One Night Only CD and DVD are oustanding. Do you know how many copies the DVD has sold in the States? The set has spent 388 weeks in the top 40 and this very week is at number 18.
Thanks in advance and keep up the good work
Thanks MJD for the feedback. I dont agree with your grounds regarding Spirits but they are valid and you could have a point. I was very surprised though with the great sales of singles Staying Alive, Night Fever Tragedy and Too Much Heaven. Besides the sales of One Night Only CD and DVD are oustanding. Do you know how many copies the DVD has sold in the States? The set has spent 388 weeks in the top 40 and this very week is at number 18.
Thanks in advance and keep up the good work
Hi again Juan!
Sorry to disappoint but I may even downgrade Spirits sales soon. I just ended to found out with 100% certainty the industry top seller in the US in 1979 was Zeppelin album In Through the Outdoor with less than 4 million - in fact it was certified 3xP in 1984. It appears clear in regards to Spirit that the "4,5 million in 10 weeks" claim is wrong. The Long Run, 11 weeks #1 by Christmas by the Eagles sold 3m only while Rod Stewart who preceded the Bee Gees at the top did 2 million. All information is official and come from 1979 Financial Report of Warner Communications.
Both Warner and Billboard reported how disastruous 1979 first semester was with a complete absence of blockbuster albums. In April of that year, the latter reported Spirits was the only 2-million seller from the Top 10 Album chart while exactly two years earlier half of the Top 10 was over that mark.
One Night Only DVD is estimated on 700,000 units to date in the US - and nearly 800,000 in Latin America!!
All four singles you mention sold 2/2,8m in the US and 1,7/2,1m in Europe plus as you know huge results elsewhere even if markets were truly weak.
http://www.americanradiohistory.com/Archive-Billboard/70s/1979/Billboard%201979-04-21.pdf
MJD. Look please at page 112 of issue dated April 21 1979. Spirits reported with 4 million sales
Hi again Juan!
Yes, I saw this add on Billboard, but at no point it confirms 4m sales in the US - first, there is no reference to the US, it is most likely the global shipment. Second, if it refers to the US, it would still be no evidence as the album shipped immensely in its first two months, the gross shipment by then was likely higher than the net shipment by the end of the year.
Financial reports of Warner are 100% factual, you can check the one of 1979 (pages 26/32) which makes it very clear that Led Zeppelin album was the most shipped of the year in the US, all majors included. You have plenty of sales figures for big 1979 albums too, you will be able to see that various albums with runs close / as good as Spirit all sold 1-3 million units.
I believe there was several real huge album sellers in 1979, also Breakfast in America by Supertramp competed with Spirits. Besides the disco backlash had already started to hurt the Bee Gees in late 1979.
A main problem with the Bee Gees catalogue is that in several long periods most of the studioalbums have been out of print, hard to find. They could have sold millions more if the company and Barry would not focus to much on hit collections. The overall very strong studioalbums tells the true story of how many great songs the public often are not given chance to discover, sadly enough.
Job well done again! This analysis must have taken quite a long time considering the volume of the Bee Gees discography!
Their discography is quite similar to that of Fleetwood Mac's (One mega blockbuster, 1-2 very successful albums, a few albums with decent success, and the rest lie in the 1-3m range, accumulating a very healthy total)
I'm quite surprised by how massive SNF is! Despite being in the same era and being remembered as successful as SNF, Grease is more than 10m units below the former! 65m+ is absolutely unbelievable! I wonder how big Thriller would be when you do a MJ CSPC analysis! No doubt it's the most successful album ever, but the number must be insane!
Also, as I've noticed and you've mentioned in the Beatles and this analysis, the physical singles market was absolutely huge in the 60's/late 70's! Lots of singles from that time sold bucketloads! I want to ask you what do you think is the peak for this format? While the 60's and the disco era was huge, i feel like the 90's, especially from the mid to late 90's was pretty big, with several huge sellers (IWALY, Candles in the Wind)
Looking forward for your upcoming Janet Jackson analysis! About her, I want to ask whether you still have Control over 10m copies, RN1814 over 11m copies and DOAD over 9m copies considering you deducted 0,5-1m units from their US total since your last update.
Incredible job! This must have took ages to do. Keep up the amazing job, I love reading this site!
Hi Raffi!
To answer your question about physical singles sales, since IFPI started reporting the format in 1973 the best year has been, maybe surprisingly, 1983 with 800 million singles sold Worldwide. This figure is kind of a mistery to me as the main markets we know US / JP / UK / FR / GE added for only 399 million for the year, down from 405 million in 1982 while only 580 million singles were sold in the World, so this may have been a typo from the IFPI.
If we focus on the five main markets, the peak was in 1979 with 493 million singles sold. It was a pretty stable total as from 1973 to 1982 the number stayed in the 405-493 million range. Starting from 1979 peak it decreased every year until 1988 though, reaching a 276 million low that year. Then it climbed back up in almost all years until a new high point in 1997 at 466 million. The interesting point is how linear those figures are ultimately as from 1973 to 2001 the lasticity is less than 1 to 2 since the low point of 276m is still a healthy 56% of the peak at 493m.
While comprehensive figures aren't available for earlier years, Japan was big from mid-60s but still weaker than later years, the US market was huge in several eras including 350 (!) million in 1947 and 200+ million during the 60s, a figure it never reached again after 1974. The big difference during the 60s though was in the remaining markets - countries like Italy which had very low markets since 40 years were massive singles markets in the Beatles decade. While a mere 2 million singles were sold in most years of the 90s there, some stand-alone singles shifted close to 1 million units during the 60s. The same situation was true for various World markets.
Bee Gees Music Sales Grow 669% Following Grammy Salute
http://www.billboard.com/articles/colum ... mmy-salute
