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please don't compare world music legends like madonna and jackson vs brooks i laugh just the comparison but also the comparison robbie williams coldplay vs garth brooks is the same
You need to be more objective. Nobody is saying Garth was a bigger global star than Madonna or MJ. What everyone here is saying is that Garth sold an uncharacteristically large amount of material in the United States, only The Beatles sold more. The fact that he sold so much in the US and little elsewhere is impressive regardless of how you look at it.
Both artists are not on some of those platforms like Spotify I guess. Probably that's why both sales figures are not updated if they even exist.
Yes Brooks is only on Amazon I think, and Neil Young has pulled his music from Spotify a couple years ago.
Neil Young's biggest hits are still available on Spotify though through Soundtracks, VA comps etc. I don't think he's too undervalued, although probably a bit.
Garth Brooks is indeed on Amazon only, but he's still over 200m on Spotify from some minor live version and features. Since Amazon was not that big when we studied him is his to date total definitely undervalued to a degree. But I don't think we're talking about millions of units here.
Yeah I was just trying to compare them with their contemporaries. Brooks is such a weird case, it's like he doesn't want his music to be remembered or something, like in the 2000s when you couldn't buy his albums at some point, I guess it's about money in the end (in this case a lucrative deal with Amazon surely).
It's because Spotify doen't make any money properly, when doing tours like Brooks does already performing- and synchrights make more money. It would be great if one day the artists performing rights could be put up for sale.
IFPI count them in turnover. They are in total about 10 % of the total recording income.
He also had that exclusive Walmart deal, I think on his box sets. I agree, some strange business decisions over the course of his career.
Not sure if it was even that much about money, I mean some of those box sets were super cheap. It's almost like his main goal was to get as high on the RIAA tally as possible haha
On the same subject, I just realized the number of followers for Amazon were on Songstats, they're a little surprising actually: Taylor Swift 4m (101m on Spotify), Garth Brooks and George Strait around 1m (Strait has 4m on Spotify)... I can't find a list with "most followed artists" though, is it available somewhere?
Oh yeah the RIAA is definitely part of it, he convinced a lot of people that he sold 170m albums in the US or something... The streaming part is weird though, he had this "Ghostunes" thing early on which was a huge flop (obviously), I just don't see the logic of being Amazon-exclusive besides money, I remember people speculating that it was also Neil Young's motivation.
