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Hi! I have the same question as Luminator above but for DOAD
It sold about 2.5M according to soundscan
Add the 1.48M sold in BMG which isn't tracked by soundscan
You get 3.98M sold already enough for the 4x platinum certification
However this album was available in Columbia Music Club (as were her other AM releases Control, and Rhythm Nation) and considering how big it was in BMG, one would assume it also sold well at Columbia (which was an even bigger music club in terms of membership)
Did it sell next to nothing at Columbia?
Thank you in advance
Hi Luminator (& Robby),
Janet US album Club sales were explained in the related Columbia House article. Virgin stopped selling their albums in all Clubs very early, it wasn't only an issue with Columbia House but all of them.
About Soundscan not covering the entire market, it is actually an argument to be even more careful with Janet. As a big pop artist, formulas used by Soundscan to extrapolate scans to the full market were most likely in the high side, something that remained true during the entire 90s. Every evidence suggest white pop acts a la Britney Spears or Aguilera happen to have Soundscan sales higher than their real retail sales for example. Janet case is not that extreme as she did had poorly scanned urban retails on her side but still she was a big star, acts slightly inflated by Soundscan overall in the early days of the system.
Soundscan and Clubs assumptions should never be regarded as fundamentals to estimate sales to date, the starting point is the RIAA certification, the only tool involving no calculation whatsoever. The album Janet was updated as it was breaking criterias, 3xP in 08/93, 4xP in 11/93, 5xP in 12/93 and 6xP in 04/94. At the time, Soundscan sales were already way past 5 million, retail shipments on about 5,5 million, plus a bit more than 1,5 million after. This latter figure of 1,5 million post-certification shipment is the only one you can safely add to the certified amount. As the album was removed from BMG not that long after, it has obviously not ship much in the mean-time, with a figure around 8 million making perfect sense.
Music Box is a completely different case. When both albums entered catalog status and should have start selling high amounts at discount price at Columbia House, Mariah Carey was smashing with Daydream, heavily boosting MB. On her side, Janet was not only removed from all music clubs, but DOAD was released destroying the appeal of her studio albums.
An important element to keep in mind are annual reports from the label. All figures are consistent with them. In concrete words, if you assume the US figure is underestimated, then every unit you add you will need to subtract it from sales abroad. Considering the information available for other markets, the most realistic scenario is the most sensible one - that Janet album sold near nothing outside SS/BMG.
As for DOAD, the album wasn't certified 3xP while new. If certs in the long run can be well overdue, during the initial promotion of a record labels used to get them up to date. It is visible in all Janet own albums and A&M also certified many albums all over 1996. Thus, the starting point is that DOAD shipped less than 3m units by the start of 1997. Soon clubs vanished and its Soundscan total isn't that great so the amount of catalog sales managed afterwards is limited.
The "it was big on BMG so it must have been big on Columbia" reasoning is wrong, even if some exceptions managed that like Mariah or Shania, the logic was pretty much the opposite. A bit like YouTube vs Spotify, they cannibalize each other. DOAD was fairly expensive at Columbia. Also, BMG Club was a club mostly for young / pop audience, while Columbia was way more into vocal acts / MOR / Folk / Rock / adult music. Obviously, Janet audience was way more BMG-oriented and its initial sales there suggest it was likely an exclusive there during its initial era.
Wow, that was extremely insightful! I fully agree on each point and i can understand your estimation a lot better now.
Thank you for actually taking the time to deal with all of the questions in the comment section. I really appreciate that!
Keep up the great work!
Thank you for the explanation. Truly appreciate it!
Just a few more clarifications regarding DOAD:
1. How can we be certain that DOAD shipped less than 3M by the start of 1997? Janet was back with Virgin records at that time and could it be that A&M just didn't bother with its recertification since she is no longer their artist?
2. You mentioned that soon clubs vanished after 1997 implying that DOAD couldn't have benefited from additional club sales from either BMG or Columbia. There were still ads as late as 2002 advertising columbia music club in magazines (with DOAD albums included in the listings) so might it have sold more copies in Columbia as you might have originally thought?
https://books.google.com.ph/books?id=qvIDAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA45&dq=%22Columbia+House%22+%22Janet+Jackson%22&pg=PA45&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false
All the best!
Hi again Robbie!
A&M certified many albums in 1996 including from artists not in their roster anymore. Janet own DOAD music video was certified in 1996! Plus, second year shipments of big holiday season compilation cash-ins are negative more often than not. Retailers used to order a lot of copies for such releases, not needing to be feed anymore the following year. Even now you can see how high Bruno Mars, Metallica and the Rolling Stones are in the IFPI Report, because they got heavily shipped. Adele shipped barely 12% of her last year numbers due to that and this is an album that has been selling all year long. DOAD was dead after 1996 Q1 and there was no digital sales at the time so the gap sales-shipments in first months was even bigger.
DOAD sold 1,1m units in 1995 and 1,5m+ by the end of 1996, shipped likely about 1,7m for the period at retail only. The strong gap in Soundscan sales in 1995 and its 2xPlatinum award that year means BMG got the album earlier than usual - the norm was to put it on Clubs 3 months after release, which implies they negotiated an exclusivity over the content and certainly committed in a minimum of copies they were going to sell, which is why the cert came so fast and why the unnatural ratio retail / club sales of this release. Thus, you can expect the main part of the 1,48m BMG Club to have come fast, plus 1,7m sales at retail and yet it wasn't certified 3xP which suggest low - or zero, if indeed as it seems the album was first a BMG exclusive - sales in other retailers. This is even more confirmed as from late 1995 / early 1996 Columbia House adds I have seen, DOAD was indeed absent from there - I would be inclined to change the figure if this ends up proven wrong! I won't expect it to happen yet as this 2-pages full Columbia House add from Mai 1996 shows Janet being completely absent from it, just like from this 5-pages 1999 ad!
Since then, it added less than 800,000 units at retail. If you check Columbia sales of all big late 90s albums by doing Certification minus Soundscan plus BMG, you will notice they pretty much disappeared from 1998 to 1999. That's really the breaking point when BMG took the definitive lead, getting exclusivity on all big albums and letting only low catalog sales for Columbia. Even if we assume DOAD sold 10% of its retail sales at Columbia from 1997 to 2002, which is truly pushing it over the limits as entire club sales went from 8% of the market to 4% of it in the period, most of which were for BMG, that would still represent only about 60,000 copies, just enough to push the total on 4 million once combining with Soundscan / BMG sales.
Hope it helps!
Hello MJD!
Thank you for taking the time and explaning this to me. I understand where you are coming from and your logic is sound.
I do however want to also point out that Columbia continued to advertise DOAD in 1997 and also in 1999 so i do not think the album was completely absent from their roster but you are probably right that it most probably had a exclusivity deal with BMG early on.
Thank you again and keep up the good work! 🙂
1997 ad
https://books.google.com.ph/books?id=aV4EAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA48-IA2&dq=%22Columbia+House%22+%22Janet+Jackson%22&pg=PA48-IA2&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false
1999 ad
https://books.google.com.ph/books?id=YG5YubNw1pgC&lpg=PA82-IA1&dq=%22Columbia+House%22+%22Janet+Jackson%22&pg=PA82-IA1&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false
Hi again Robby!
Yes, a few years ago I posted the complete catalog of Columbia House as of 1997 on UKmix and DOAD was definitely part of it from that year, that's why I used the 1997-2002 period in previous calculation.
In both articles about Columbia House, I pointed out the "scale" issue with pictured albums selling way more than listed albums, themselves selling more than albums part of the comprehensive club catalog but absent from main ads. The 1997 ad is interesting - it is from Black Enterprise, as it names evidence a black magazine. On SPIN - a generalist magazine - issues from that year it wasn't present. Kind of normal if we notice the album wasn't part of the Top 23 sellers from 1997 black catalog, so it was logically absent from cross-over ads. The album was also listed in a couple of Latin magazines too and it made Vibe listing when The Velvet Rope came out. It is interesting to notice those clubs used a logic very similar to FM radios in their albums listings for marketing purpose!
Also worth highlighting is that albums ranked at #1, #2 and #4 were all Columbia House exclusives showing very well the cannibalization effect a la YouTube vs Spotify!
Hello MJD!
Much appreciated! It would save us all these speculations if Columbia published their bestsellers ala BMG wouldn't it? One can wish! 🙂
Thank you again
Robby
If Richard Branson said that "Janet" sold over 20 million copies and then gave her 80 million dollars and made her the best paid artist in history for the second time. then that must be truth. You're not signing to anyone for 120 million dollars with these numbers, yo you're wrong.
Hi Bojan,
This is a good wishful thinking for sure. What about Richard Branson's label financial report that proves Janet. sold only 8 million units Worldwide by March 1994 ? Wishes and facts are very different at times.
Nothing with that. The album was heavily promoted and had hit singles until mid 1995. How do you explain the fact that they made her the highest paid artist of all time after that album? Even if it didn't sell "over 20 million" as stated in Branson's autobiography, his number must be closer to the truth than yours. After all, these sales estimates are all guesswork. Unless you have exact number in terms of shipments from a Record company, it's impossible to know how many copies were sold worldwide.
I man, no big deal. I'm not mad on you or something. You're just one of us, not some official source. 🙂
No offence, but the only wishful thinking here is that you're a music industry expert. I respect your hard work and it does help us to be closer to the truth, but you don't have a final word so please avoid that approach if you want to be taken seriously. The truth is somewhere in between your estimations and record company claims. According to official website and promo videos from the late '90s she had over 50 million albums sold at that point. According to BBC's team that was working on Janet Jackson documentary in 2010, she has sold over 65 million albums, which seems very accurate. With singles and videos added, it's around 110 million records sold. She had several times less releases than Celine or Madonna, not to mention The Rolling Stones and few more artists, and that's 6 million in pure sales per album in average, which is fantastic. If we exclude her first two albums, because I kinda find it hard to count them as hers, that's 7, 2 million per album. For instance, The Rolling Stones' and Celine's average is 7 million, Madonna's 9,7 million - using your data, of course. So I don't understand why are some people disappointed, Janet's sales were amazing, especially knowing that she was making a kind of music that wasn't a mainstream in some of the world's biggest markets. I'm really impressed and no wonder she became the highest paid artists of all time twice during her career. Btw, I know that The Guinness World Records is far from being accurate when it comes to sales, but they claim that "Janet" is the best selling dance album of the '90s. What would other contenders be?
Britney performed "Black Cat" on her first tour. Britney's way of dancing is so Janet and not that much in style of Madonna. Britney's music, though, is not even near as good and important as Janet's or even Madonna's. Your art is what makes you legendary and imortal, not comercial success and records. That comes and goes and average people don't even think about that aspect. That being said, Janet's place in history is cemented long ago, but I'm not sure about Britney. She's like Paula Abdul to me. But that's the other story.
