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No, Metallica is much closer to Pink Floyd, a band who sold 200m albums including about 14m compilations...
Hi Analord!
I see that you keep your vendetta against me, but no issue I'll answer on raw facts as usual.
There are two main things to consider with this example of One.
1) the specific nature of the Beatles' catalog. It's actually detailed on their article and various comments I made how much they benefited from having not 1 discography as most artists but 2 discographies, their studio sets and their stand-alone singles. This enabled EMI to sell countless of compilations with an impact on studio albums that is quite lower than the usual impact. Red / Blue sold a lot because they included big stand-alone hits, without needing to hit studio albums that hard. And then studio albums remained strong as while continuing to sell, their status improved, their album cuts remained well known, etc. In the end, their whole catalog kept living, rather than only a few hits, more on that later.
2) About One, the main error from you is that you check things from one point of view, the one of the buyer. There are 3 prime actors yet, the buyer, the label, and the retailer. Here, the most impacted releases have been the ones with the same role in their previous catalog, these were Red and Blue and Past Masters 1/2, the ones home to their big stand-alone hits. They went from selling 1.355 million in 93-99 to 266k in 2001-2007 (inc. half when they were reactivated in 2007), which means they lost 80.3% of their sales.
You mention Help!, it did lose as many as 70.2% of its sales (from 240k to 72k). A Hard Day's Night lost 66.6%. Indeed, albums impacted directly by 1 lost 60% of their sales or more, including Abbey Road. So their compilations similar to 1 lost 80% of their sales, studio albums impacted by its tracklist about 65%. Albums with no track on it? The 3 you mention went down by 57% in these years. Why so, if there are no track in common? A part is because the regular buyer had his need of Beatles' music satisfied by 1. This doesn't last forever, these are waves, as it's very visible in Beatles' release strategy for 50 years, and indeed this same buyer was ready to pick the studio albums when the remasters arrived.
But the main reason of the drop in sales lies on retailers. Specialists will have it all (hence albums retaining 40%+ of their sales), but mass merchants won't stock tons of albums from one artist. When 'One' arrived, it became the go-to product of the Beatles to store. Before, retailers had either Red/Blue, or the 3-4 classics, One instantly moved ahead of them in the hierarchy. The buyer that hear the Beatles' songs or hear about them and want to buy an album will be happy with what's available, no matter if it's One, Sgt Pepper's or Abbey Road.
Thus, this drop in sales of 3 of their classics although they weren't part of 1's tracklist doesn't contradict the fact that compilations take off sales from studio albums, instead it confirms it, as One effectively replaced all these albums on many shelves.
It brings me to the core value of a catalog. It is the sum of all songs available. It's getting clearer every day with TikTok boosting to death random album cuts from the past, tracks that were ignored by labels for decades. Each song has a value, an organic appeal. When a compilation is released, your 100+ tracks catalog is reduced to 12-15 tracks. From that point, you stop selling the combined worth of the 100 tracks, instead you are limited to the remaining 15. That's what happened to ABBA, comps were sold so early that people hasn't got the time to get into their album cuts, so people were left unfamiliar with them, so they weren't used in the media, etc. Some say they were a "singles band", but the reality is that in countries were they broke over their studio albums were destroying sales of many supposed "album bands". It's just that their label removed their album cuts from their catalog too early.
With 1, EMI decided to put the lights on one package for 8 years, generating a lot of profit very fast. That virtually removed a large part of their catalog to many potential buyers yet. The way their catalog sales overall went down and down every year from that point until the focus was put back on studio albums shows the danger of compilations. Of course, now that Abbey Road or Sgt Pepper's are so legendary they won't be forgotten fast, but if that situation remained their impact and even recognition would have gone down year after year. Had they been replaced by a major compilation in 1971, who knows where these albums would be among all-time best albums lists. You can even reverse the case, and you'll notice that most albums listed among all-time best albums lists got no competing compilation for many years, and vice versa. At the end of the day, compilations impact a catalog in so many ways, they can keep afloat the catalog of a mid-range artist who got 1-2 hits, but for most artists we speak about on ChartMasters their main consequence, over the easy cash-in upon release, is to restrain the catalog of an artist to very few tracks, and reduce its status and credibility.
I definitely don't think ABBA's studio albums would've become major classics without their compilations, and for the same reason I think a lot of people who bought One would've never bought these classic Beatles albums, as I said it's a different kind of audience.
You might be right about not liking "ifs" very much though, but guessing can be fun sometimes 😉
"Had they been replaced by a major compilation in 1971, who knows where these albums would be among all-time best albums lists."
What about the 1973 Red/Blue compilations ?
Oh, and I don't have a "vendetta" against you 😆
“Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson
where is their breakdown sales per country? iam curious to see how much they sold in Europe, 35M i guess?
