Returning with their ninth album Feed The Machine this month, Nickelback is one of those in-between type rock bands. Not old enough to be considered as Classic Rock, and too old to be a fresh new act, they belong to the group made up of Coldplay, Green Day, Linkin Park and Evanescence.

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They are also part of the group of major selling Canadian acts. Michael Bublé, Shania Twain, Celine Dion, the Weeknd, Avril Lavigne, Alanis Morissette, Justin Bieber, Shawn Mendes, Nelly Furtado, Bryan Adams, Drake, Neil Young, Paul Anka, Arcade Fire, Leonard Cohen, Simple Plan, Feist, Carly Rae Jepsen, Gordon Lightfoot, and Sarah McLachlan... the list goes on and on.

How big are Nickelback though? While everybody knows who Celine Dion is, the rock band is completely unknown to this day in various countries like France or Mexico which are solid music markets. Their US success is undeniable, but is it enough to make them an A-List act on a global scale?

Nickelback Albums Sales

NB: N/A means no specific number is available. Sales from the country are still accounted for in the Worldwide estimate by using figure patterns of both the artist and the country market. Countries not displayed in this fixed panel are also factored in.

Curb (1996)

The State (1998)

Silver Side Up (2001)

• America

  • US - 6,700,000
  • Canada - 925,000
  • Argentina - N/A
  • Brazil - N/A
  • Mexico - N/A

• Asia - 180,000

  • Japan - N/A

• Oceania

  • Australia - 240,000
  • New Zealand - 25,000

• Europe - 2,680,000

  • UK - 1,150,000
  • France - 210,000
  • Germany - 480,000
  • Italy - 120,000
  • Spain - 30,000
  • Sweden - 55,000
  • Netherlands - 100,000
  • Switzerland - 65,000
  • Austria - 50,000
  • Finland - 20,000

• World - 11,100,000

The Long Road (2003)

• America

  • US - 4,100,000
  • Canada - 540,000
  • Argentina - N/A
  • Brazil - 40,000
  • Mexico - N/A

• Asia - 120,000

  • Japan - 75,000

• Oceania

  • Australia - 280,000
  • New Zealand - 15,000

• Europe - 860,000

  • UK - 350,000
  • France - 30,000
  • Germany - 200,000
  • Italy - 45,000
  • Spain - N/A
  • Sweden - 10,000
  • Netherlands - 25,000
  • Switzerland - 30,000
  • Austria - 20,000
  • Finland - 10,000

• World - 6,100,000

All the Right Reasons (2005)

Dark Horse (2008)

Here and Now (2011)

No Fixed Address (2014)

Feed the Machine (2017)

• World - 200,000

Estimation of initial shipment plus first week download sales.

Original Album Sales - Comments

1996 Curb - 650,000
1998 The State - 1,700,000
2001 Silver Side Up - 11,100,000
2003 The Long Road - 6,100,000
2005 All the Right Reasons - 11,850,000
2008 Dark Horse - 5,700,000
2011 Here and Now - 2,250,000
2014 No Fixed Address - 950,000
2017 Feed the Machine - 200,000

Over the course of 9 albums, including the freshly released Feed the Machine, Nickelback sold 40,5 million studio albums. To put things into perspective, Linkin Park sold close to 48 million while Coldplay are up to 58 million. Considering the difficulties of the Canadian group to truly make an impact in various countries, getting so close to the 2 biggest bands of the last 20 years is fairly impressive.

In fact, Silver Side Up managed to sell well everywhere with nearly 40% of its sales coming from outside the US, but their following albums were way more US-centric in terms of success. All the Right Reasons sold past 9,3 million in North America alone. This is a tremendous achievement. Making the album one of the very top selling albums of the last 15 years in the region.

Their trajectory has been seen again and again. A couple of albums before breaking the mainstream audience, then 6 to 8 years of success, and then a strong collapse in fame album after album. It doesn't prevent the drop from being a painful one. As in less than a decade their sales have been divided by more than 10, given Feed The Machine will struggle to sell even half a million units.

Obviously, the market totally changed during this last decade, moving from a sales-oriented market to an environment dominated by digital units. Does this latter platform give back some justice to their recent outputs, or are they just flops?

Physical Singles Sales

Up to just over 3 million physical singles sold, Nickelback were clearly not a force on in this format. This is pretty standard among Rock bands for which promoting albums was more efficient. More than half of the tally comes from their crossover smash How You Remind Me.

As a reminder, the weighting is done with a 10 to 3 ratio between one album and one physical single.

The State (1998) - 6,000 equivalent albums

All singles - 20,000

Silver Side Up (2001) - 591,000 equivalent albums

Never Again - 30,000
How You Remind Me - 1,750,000
Too Bad - 190,000

The Long Road (2003) - 150,000 equivalent albums

Someday - 340,00
Feelin' Way Too Damn Good - 70,000
Figured You Out - 90,000

All the Right Reasons (2005) - 135,000 equivalent albums

Photograph - 180,000
Animals - 20,000
Savin' Me - 40,000
Far Away - 90,000
If Everyone Cared - 30,000
Rockstar - 90,000

Dark Horse (2008) - 24,000 equivalent albums

Gotta Be Somebody - 50,000
Remaining Singles - 30,000

Digital Singles Sales

As a reminder, the weighting is done with a 10 to 1,5 ratio between albums and digital singles.

Part 1

Many Rock bands saw their back catalog explode after the success of their first ground breaking hit. This impact was pretty minor for Nickelback with both Curb and The State being largely forgotten nowadays.

Silver Side Up is somewhat disappointing in the download field too. Obviously, the downloads market didn't explode until the mid-00s. Nevertheless, How You Remind Me was quite simply the most aired song of the decade in the US, as well as a big hit everywhere. Thus 3,1 million units sold as a catalog track isn't impressive. The other tracks have very limited appeal.

Curb (1996) - 18,000 equivalent albums

Remaining tracks - 120,000

The State (1998) - 24,000 equivalent albums

Remaining tracks - 160,000

Silver Side Up (2001) - 570,000 equivalent albums

Never Again - 200,000
How You Remind Me - 3,100,000
Too Bad - 200,000
Remaining tracks - 300,000

Part 2

Among the first albums that fully exploited download sales, All The Right Reasons has a golden spot. As many as five of its songs sold 3,8 million or more. The biggest of them is Rockstar with 9 million copies sold. The overall total of 30,8 million units sold by tracks from this album is already incredible, but the 25,2 million achieved in the US is pure madness.

On a lower scale, Dark Horse reproduced a similar pattern with an impressive 7 singles moving more than 1 million copies for a cumulative tally of 16,5 million.

The Long Road (2003) - 285,000 equivalent albums

Someday - 1,300,000
Figured You Out - 200,000
Remaining tracks - 400,000

All the Right Reasons (2005) - 4,620,000 equivalent albums

Photograph - 6,200,000
Animals - 1,300,000
Savin' Me - 4,100,000
Far Away - 5,300,000
If Everyone Cared - 3,800,000
Rockstar - 9,000,000
Remaining tracks - 1,100,000

Dark Horse (2008) - 2,475,000 equivalent albums

Something in Your Mouth - 1,100,000
Burn It to the Ground - 1,800,000
Gotta Be Somebody - 4,300,000
I'd Come for You - 1,300,000
Never Gonna Be Alone - 1,700,000
If Today Was Your Last Day - 3,600,000
This Afternoon - 1,800,000
Remaining tracks - 900,000

Part 3

Just like their album sales, Nickelback's sales of download songs plummeted strongly as each era passed by in recent years.

In total, this is still a very solid 57,3 million units of downloads and ringtones sold since the start of this format.

Here and Now (2011) - 435,000 equivalent albums

When We Stand Together - 1,700,000
Lullaby - 600,000
Remaining tracks - 600,000

No Fixed Address (2014) - 150,000 equivalent albums

What Are You Waiting For? - 500,000
Remaining tracks - 500,000

Feed the Machine (2017) - 7,500 equivalent albums

All tracks - 50,000

Orphan - 7,500 equivalent albums

Remaining tracks - 50,000

Streaming Sales

Streaming is made up of two families - audio and video. Our CSPC methodology now includes both to better reflect the real popularity of each track. The main source of data for each avenue is respectively Spotify and YouTube. As detailed in the Fixing Log article, Spotify represents 132 million of the 212 million users of streaming platforms, while YouTube is pretty much the only video platform generating some revenue for the industry. Below is the equivalence set on the aforementioned article:

Audio Stream - 1500 plays equal 1 album unit
Video Stream - 11,750 views equal 1 album unit

Thus...

Equivalent Albums Sales = 212/132 * Spotify streams / 1500 + YouTube views / 11750

Streaming Part 1

Once again the first albums of the band fail to perform well. All the songs from Curb are under 1 million streams on both Spotify and YouTube.

The second album is pretty similar with only Leader of Men getting some love at 3,6 million and 2,3 million streams on Spotify and YouTube respectively.

All streams merged together represent 8,000 equivalent album sales for Curb and 12,000 for The State.

Streaming Part 2

Track lists from both Silver Side Up and The Long Road follow the same pattern as one another, with one big hit and the remaining songs all over 1 million, but also all under 10 million streams on Spotify.

There is one big difference though - the strength of the aforementioned hit. Someday is solid at 37 million, plus 16 million streams on both audio and video main platforms. It can't compete with How You Remind Me though which flies at a superb 144 million streams on Spotify and 346 million on YouTube. Consequently, equivalent album sales of Silver Side Up are much higher at 221,000 units against 80,000 for The Long Road.

Streaming Part 3

Here comes what may be the biggest surprise of this entire article - Dark Horse topping All the Right Reasons in the streaming arena.

Both are incredible. They are both on their way to reaching 400,000 equivalent album sales soon. That impressive number is achieved without a single song coming even close to 100 million streams on Spotify. Which highlights an insane consistency for all the songs on those albums.

Continuing on with the stunning facts,  Burn It to the Ground is the biggest catalog hit of all those songs along with Rockstar, topping the far bigger songs Savin' Me, Far Away, Photograph and Gotta Be Somebody.

Streaming Part 4

Here And Now saw a sharp drop from its predecessors in terms of sales. It came out in 2011, before the boom of streaming. Nevertheless, it grosses 246,000 equivalent album sales, a very respectable result. When We Stand Together is the main benefactor of this total with 85 million streams on Spotify.

No Fixed Address lacks a hit of this magnitude, as its biggest is under 30 million. The consequence is striking with only 115,000 equivalent album sales, less than its 3 predecessors, although it is the only one that came out in a favorable context as streaming was becoming big by 2014/2015.

Streaming Part 5

Released only a few days ago, Feed the Machine still has plenty of time to increase its weak 14,000 equivalent album sales total. I won't lie though - it is starting very slowly.

There is no relevant track that is available outside of their studio album. The minor outtakes are listed altogether in the Orphan folder.

Full Length related record Sales

It sounds fairly logical to add together weighted sales of one era - studio album, physical singles, downloads, streams - to get the full picture of an album's popularity. For older releases though, they also generate sales of various live, music videos and compilation albums.

All those packaging-only records do not create value, they exploit the value originating from the parent studio album of each of its tracks instead. Inevitably, when such compilations are issued, this downgrades catalog sales of the original LP. Thus, to perfectly gauge the worth of these releases, we need to re-assign sales proportionally to its contribution of all the compilations which feature its songs. The following table explains this method.

Remaining Long Format

How to understand this table? If you check for example the Greatest Hits: The Best Of compilation line, those figures mean it sold 800,000 units worldwide. The second statistics column means all versions of all the songs included on this package add for 1,025,000 equivalent album sales from streams of all types.

The second part on the right of the table shows how many equivalent streams are coming from each original album, plus the share it represents on the overall package. Thus, streaming figures tell us songs from Dark Horse are responsible for 27% of The Best Of track list attractiveness. This means it generated 218,000 of its 800,000 album sales and so forth for the other records.

Interestingly, as those music videos, and then the compilation were released steadily over time, we see that the outrageous domination of Silver Side Up as the main appeal provider lost ground release after release. Both All The Right Reasons and Dark Horse ended up topping it, although the 2001 album still has the lead cumulatively.

Full Length related records Sales - Summary

Here is the most underestimated indicator of an album's success - the amount of compilation sales of all kinds it generated. Due to the dependency of sales of the original studio albums on these releases, they are a key piece of the jigsaw.

This table leaves no room for doubt - so far, the entire attractiveness of Nickelback's catalog comes from their 2001-2011 albums.

BONUS: Total Album (all types) Sales per Country

• America

  • US - 26,325,000
  • Canada - 3,480,000
  • Argentina - N/A
  • Brazil - 215,000
  • Mexico - N/A

• Asia - 880,000

  • Japan - 535,000

• Oceania

  • Australia - 1,585,000
  • New Zealand - 145,000

• Europe - 7,750,000

  • UK - 3,310,000
  • France - 340,000
  • Germany - 1,810,000
  • Italy - 285,000
  • Spain - 70,000
  • Sweden - 165,000
  • Netherlands - 215,000
  • Switzerland - 260,000
  • Austria - 160,000
  • Finland - 80,000

• World - 41,300,000

Please note that some of the countries totals may be slightly incomplete when the figure is N/A for minor releases. Countries with too much missing information to be precise enough are listed as N/A.

Nickelback Career CSPC results

So, after checking all the figures, how many overall equivalent album sales has each Nickelback album achieved? Well, at this point we hardly need to add up all of the figures defined in this article!

[xyz-ips snippet="updatedCSPCalbums"]

Closing in on 16 million, All The Right Reasons confirms its status among the biggest albums of the 00s. There is no CSPC total limited to the US only, but figures add for more than 13 million for this country alone, which basically makes it the biggest album there since 2005, after Adele's 21.

Silver Side Up is up to 13,3 million on the back of one hit alone (How You Remind Me), while The Long Road did half of that number. Unexpectedly, Dark Horse was first regarded as a flop after failing to generate big hype in spite of following a monster album. Hard work and various singles changed this result fully. It finishes up with a strong total of 8,8 million.

The remaining albums do not contribute so much but we are still speaking of a total of 53,3 million equivalent album sales for Nickelback since their debut. Just like many artists from their generation, the target now is to reverse the trend of success. While not easy, this is more feasible for bands who are less affected by ageism. U2, Bon Jovi or Aerosmith are among the examples to follow in the upcoming huge comebacks category.

The following sections list their most successful songs.

As usual, feel free to comment and / or ask a question!

Sources: IFPI, Spotify, YouTube, Chartmasters.org.

BIGGEST TRACKS - Nickelback

The list of most successful songs is compiled in album equivalent sales generated by each of them. It includes the song's own physical singles sales with a 0,3 weighting, its download and streaming sales, and with appropriate weighting too, plus its share among sales of all albums on which it is featured.

1 2001 - How You Remind Me [Silver Side Up] - 11,080,000
2 2005 - Rockstar [All the Right Reasons] - 4,350,000
3 2003 - Someday [The Long Road] - 3,550,000
4 2005 - Far Away [All the Right Reasons] - 3,360,000
5 2005 - Photograph [All the Right Reasons] - 3,080,000
6 2005 - Savin' Me [All the Right Reasons] - 1,930,000
7 2008 - If Today Was Your Last Day [Dark Horse] - 1,840,000
8 2008 - Burn It to the Ground [Dark Horse] - 1,590,000
8 2008 - Gotta Be Somebody [Dark Horse] - 1,590,000
10 2005 - If Everyone Cared [All the Right Reasons] - 1,570,000

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