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Hi Richard!
Indeed, Take Me Home (album) is listed with 450,000 US sales although it was certified Gold way back in May 17, 1979. It's fairly standard, when the hype grows around a record, retailers quickly order it. The gross shipment increases fast, sales to consumers follow lagging some weeks / months behind. Most of the time, even when an album slows down popularity-wise, units shipped are sold through the next few months / years.
When the hype grows fast and disappears as fast though, various copies shipped need to be returned. Take Me Home went Gold when the album was peaking at #25, a mere 3 weeks later it was dropping out of the Top 100, it left the Top 200 altogether 5 more weeks later. The drop was too fast to enable retailers to sell ordered copies. The album had virtualy no mid-long run as in mid-1979 majors pushed hard to stop selling disco records when they noticed the airplay to sales ratio was chaotic for this genre of music. This is why big acts of 1979, including the Bee Gees, bombed insanely hard with their next albums. Then, Take Me Home was deleted - it hasn't been in CD until a limited budget issue from 1999, preventing sales to consumers to ever break the half a million units certified back in 1979.
Albums like All I Ever Need Is You, Live and Half-Breed went Gold with less sales too but for a very different reason. Until 1975, rather than 500,000 units, it was needed to gross $1 million in sales to be Gold. The price which matters in that case was the dealer price. During the 60s, LPs were sold from labels to retailers around $2 or even less, so albums were shipped at 500,000 units or more when certified. The inflation increased the dealer price to more than $3 by 1972, which means about 300,000 units were enough to hit Gold. This is how Half-Breed went Gold in spite of a very modest chart run. Due to that consistent price inflation that was deflating the merits of the Gold award, in 1975 the RIAA introduced a double criteria - $1 million grossed AND 500,000 units shipped. Obviously, there was still various cases of over-shipment happening, even more by the end of the 70s when labels had in charge the entire losses in case of unsold copies, thus creating a wide open way for retailers to orders a lot of copies. It changed in early 80s after the disaster of Sgt Pepper's soundtrack that sent RSO label to bankrupcy due to its 2 million copies returned.
Hi Raffi!
Starting with Look At Us question, I think 7 million is really the max it could have achieved. That's an awful lot for an album out of which the only hit has "only" 20 million streams. Although it was quickly deleted on its original form, it continued selling all along the way thanks to various hits package. This is one of the reasons why the Sonny & Cher discography is completely erased these days (none of their albums charted in the UK since 1994 charts, not even inside the budget chart), because 'I Got You Babe' is included in all best of albums by Cher.
Greatest Hits: 1965-1992, If I Could Turn Back Time: Cher's Greatest Hits, The Greatest Hits, The Very Best Of etc... they all include the Sonny & Cher hit, even if they are credited to Cher only.
Album sales of Usher are already completed, his article is advancing nicely 😉
Well, it depends on how you define difficult!
In terms of relative accuracy, big sellers are easier. There is so many sales confirmed from big countries that the possible window of error in terms of percentage is low. In absolute terms, working on complete bombs is easier. It doesn't matter if an uncharted album sold 20k, 50k or 80k, even if that's a 100-300% error, it represents nothing among the overall total, so it's fine.
In most, now thanks to streams / discogs, it is possible to gauge the difference of sales even between two albums that never charted now. As you no doubt understood, each attractiveness of a song stick over years. The biggest was a song for an artist in first place, the biggest it may remain in the long run. From one artist to another this isn't true, but inside the discography of an artist this is valid. We don't see flop singles become the biggest streamers of an artist with no reason. So, even if numbers of Spotify are atrocious, seeing an album at 3,000 equivalent album sales from streams and an other at 500 units, we can safely assume the first one was the biggest seller in first place. The number of editions / countries were it was released according to discogs also helps.
From a personal point of view, I always prefer working on big selling acts. The ratio work required / sales achieved is much higher which increases the motivation of compiling everything 😉
These are abismal numbers for somebody who gets called "the goddess of pop" by her delusional fans. Don't even mention the Academy Award, since that has nothing to do with music. It's very clear that, with a few exceptions (Heart of Stone and Believe and a few hits here and there) Cher's discography is non eventful to say the least
Thank you very much, MJD.
Cher's status in american pop culture doesn't have to be discussed in spite of her rather low total sales. One should not forget she ran highly-rated TV shows in the late 60's to mid-70's (The Sonny & Cher show, The Cher show). She played in popular movies in the 80's and 90's, won an Academy Award for best actress and in 2013 reached the top of the Dance/Club chart at 67 years old !
MJD mentioned her success on the video format. That's no surprise. Her tours are always among the highest-grossing of the year (especially the Farewell Tour).
WOW! Marvelous work. I'm impressed.
Cher has never been a big contender in the pop music market. Her star appeal has always lied on her personality rather than her artistry. That explains why she has always been requested by big record labels (Warner, Geffen, Casablanca), even with a incredibly huge string of flops beside her name. They knew she could make it big with the right material directed by the right producer.
The power and strength of Cher's legacy can not be estimated based on a single area of her career. Everytime her album sales would slow down or the hits would stop coming, she would enjoy big success in another area of entertainment. And that's how she managed to keep herself in the public eye for 5 decades.
She's had two hugely successful TV shows during the 1970s. Her 1981 Las Vegas residency show, for which she was paid $300,000 a week, topped Frank Sinatra's revenue during a time when her album sales where laughable. She managed to accomplish the most memorable singer-to-actor crossover of all time, winning an Oscar just 5 years after her screen debut as a dramatic actress. Her TV specials never fail to broadcast impressive numbers: her 2003 live concert film 'The Farewell Tour', aired on NBC, attracted 17 million viewers - to put it in perspective, Madonna's 'Confessions Tour' special, also aired on NBC three years later, attracted 4,1 million viewers. It goes without saying that Cher is a huge video album seller, which again proves her status as an image-driven popstar.
Cher was the prototype of today's female pop star (made-for-radio uptempo songs, big concerts, outrageous music videos, constant reinvention of music and image) during a time dominated by Barbras and Dianas, and she never managed to enjoy the benefit of MTV exposure that would rocket 1980s and 1990s image-driven popstars such as Madonna and Britney Spears. Her image appeal was confined to her 1970s shows, which were huge but local successes. When Cher came back in the late 1980s with a then MTV-friendly AOR sound, she was already in her 40s and "too old" for their teenage public.
Cher's discography is kinda messy, as the majority of her studio albums consist of one or two singles and an awful lot of fillers. In fact, she did not have any control over her own recordings until her 1987 self-titled album. The producers would choose the tracks, Cher would learn and record them, and that was that. She even stated that she could record an entire album in 3 days during the 1970s.
Cher is an almost omnipotent personality who can play the role of a singer very well, but in no way can she be defined by such term. There are many, MANY singers whose music legacies are bigger than Cher's, but Cher's overall legacy is just one of a kind.
That being said, Cher's catalog on streaming services such as YouTube and Spotify is a big fat MESS. Her YouTube videos are mostly uploaded by fans in 240p, pitch altered versions to avoid deletion (which eventually always happen). Some of her most popular singles and music videos are unavailable in the U.S. and many other countries and/or can not be viewed in mobile devices. Warner's artist management is a joke.
Again, GREAT work! 🙂
Hello MJD, congratulations on the great work and for the amazing and meticulous article about Cher.
You and your staff are great,each article is superb, detailed, is the site that I visit more frequently.
From recent messages I understand that Usher's article is in the advanced stage, then I think that after that will be the High School Musical soundtrack.
After these programmed articles do you already have in mind which singer or group to analyze ?
fantastic work. i did expect a low number for her - i mean low for someone of her stature. i can only imagine what aretha franklin's numbers would be, or diana ross (without the supremes). same for dolly parton and other 50s-60s-70s big named divas who were promoted as having sold 100 million albums...of all the females the one i am most interested in is streisand as she is the only one of the females who could be quite close to whitney in her total.
MJD, i hope that when you redo the Celine Dion chart analysis, you give a page per album including the ones released that you have called early material albums
Great, and this was probably difficult to launch into this.
This shows that selling records wasn't necessary to be a "Superstar" as we called them in the seventies. Even during the early eighties, when she didn't have a record deal, she was one. She even managed to make those downturn and erratic sales a part of her persona.
During the whole seventies, Cher was unseen in Europe or Asia, since she was locked in California for her tv series. When I first heard of her was in the early 80's and her Lps were all "Imports". Movies made her visible again and around me, Baby Boomers didn't realize she was Cher from "Sonny And Cher".
Even if it's probable that her past LPs weren't blockbusters and barely Gold for the most prominent, it's touchy to deflate all of them in a radical way.
Some uncharted, or poorly charted LP managed to went Gold or Platinum years after their released. I have a "Back To Basic" ONJ cd in mind.
Honestly speaking, no. So many music artists have sold more than 10 million copies for one album. Selling more than 6 million is good unless it was released today.
Only Believe made her relevant to music.
"Cher is an almost omnipotent personality who can play the role of a singer very well, but in no way can she be defined by such term. There are many, MANY singers whose music legacies are bigger than Cher’s, but Cher’s overall legacy is just one of a kind." quote
Well said.
Her sales are not impressive at all. Her studio albums alltogether sold like 35 million which is as much as Rihanna did. One released tons of albums during the peak of album sales, the other one debuted in the digital era. I am sure that Kylie Minogue sold less than Rihanna as well (and her fans call Janet Jackson local lol).
You should do Avril Lavigne next, she is an easy case to study. I wanna see if she moved more albums than Xtina (not equivalent units, but pure sales).
