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Starting her career so strongly, the popularity of Lady Gaga inevitably began to diminish album by album. As the years passed by, that's exactly how her career was being painted but then out of the blue, the singer decide to change her landscape and ended up proving a lot of people wrong.
On a downward trajectory for many years, her career was reinvigorated when she starred and sang in the Box Office smash, A Star Is Born OST.
But has she managed to solidify this revival in fortune, with her lastest pop effort, Chromatica?
Before we answer that or get there, let's jump back in time to the very beginning of her career.
It's 2008 and Just Dance is starting to gain heavy rotation, but essentially, it is just another dance hit, by some unknown singer.
It's 2009 and Lady Gaga is the hottest popstar on the planet. The impact she has had from nothing, to such success and popularity, in such a short time, is phenomenal and illustrates just how deeply she managed to crossover into the mainstream.
Up until the Born This Way single, everything she had released was an out of this world smash. Judas, broke this trend completely and suddenly getting a hit, seemed to become more difficult, with each subsequent release.
In 2017 and in spite of her career having been in steady decline, she was still a very recognisable star, whose public image, had undergone a definite improvement. Positive comments, for once, were starting to outweigh the usually far greater in number, disparaging and negative ones.
So, what a perfect time for a career up turn and that is exactly what happened, with the #1 hit single, Shallow. Her name was everywhere again in 2020 and for the right reasons, thanks to songs like Stupid Love and Rain On Me.
As usual, I'll be using the Commensurate Sales to Popularity Concept in order to relevantly gauge her results.
This concept will not only bring you sales information for all Lady Gaga's albums, physical and download singles, as well as audio and video streaming, but it will also determine their true popularity.
If you are not yet familiar with the CSPC method, the next page explains it with a short video. I fully recommend watching the video before getting into the sales figures. Of course, if you are a regular visitor feel free to skip the video and get into the figures.
The Commensurate Sales to Popularity Concept (CSPC)
There are two ways to understand this revolutionary concept. The first is the Scribe video posted below. If you are unaware of the CSPC method, you will get the full idea within just a few minutes.
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If you are a mathematical person, and want to know the full method as well as formulas, you can read the full introduction article.
Now let's get into the artist's sales figures in detail in order to apply this concept and define the act's true popularity!
Lady Gaga Albums Sales
Original Album Sales - Comments
Starting with a monster seller as big as The Fame can be hard to follow up.
At 15.75 million, without counting both successful side albums The Fame Monster EP and The Remix, Lady Gaga has set the criteria for success, insanely high.
Therefore, even a great success in our day and age, like Born This Way looks someway disappointing, despite 6.73 million albums sold.
If Tony Bennett-paired Jazz album Cheek To Cheek had obvious reasons to sell in lower amounts, Artpop had none and its 2.14 million sales, pale in comparison to her debut album, yet released, only a few years earlier.
With Joanne, optimistic people will say that it stopped the decreasing trend, while pessimistic ones, will point out, it failed to regain her old fans. It sold 1.3 million pure units to date.
A Star Is Born is a flashy return to form, with 3.26 million sales so far, an outstanding figure in this format by 2018/2019 standards.
2020 output Chromatica hasn't been defying market dynamics with sales coming mostly from fans preorders, something that is the norm nowadays. It is up to 680,000 units.
A total of 31.22 million studio albums, after 6 releases, is a very good figure, especially considering, all her ups and downs.
Lady Gaga Songs Sales
Physical Singles Sales
As a reminder, the weighting is done with a 10 to 3 ratio between one album and one physical single.
Lady Gaga is yet another artist, who emerged when physical sales were already dead.
Still, most of her singles were issued in various countries, even in the US, with many fans building their collection.
Combining this situation, with decent sales in France and Germany, brings her over 470,000 equivalent album sales from physical singles sales.
Digital Songs
As a reminder, the weighting is done with a 10 to 1,5 ratio between one album and one digital single.
As we review the most successful artists of our digital era, we have studied several acts with more than 100 million downloads sold. At more than 129 million, Lady Gaga is one of them.
The most striking illustration of the huge weight The Fame owns over her catalog, can be seen with its 80 million tracks sold, an unmatchable total.
Everything from this record turned into gold, including its deep cuts that sold incredibly well. We do not even need to mention how big Poker Face, Just Dance and Bad Romance have been. The former is one of the highest selling digital titles of all-time at 20.1 million.
Born This Way hits started strong too but slowed down much faster than singles from previous album. There are still 4 singles, at 3 million sales and more inside this LP.
In the same way, Artpops first two singles did OK-ish but subsequent extracts bombed so much, that I'm putting them among the Remaining Tracks category.
About the Joanne era, the lead single Perfect Illusion failed to gain traction but its follow up Million Reasons did well enough by 2016 standards, at 1.72 million units sold.
Songs from A Star Is Born are even greater sellers once we consider the context. Both ringtones and downloads are now close to their death, yet Shallow posts an incredible 2.55 million sales.
Both Stupid Love and Rain On Me are good sellers among 2020 songs, but the market is so weak at the moment, that it's only good enough for 700,000 units.
Streaming
Streaming is made up of audio and video streams. Our CSPC methodology includes both to better reflect the real popularity of each track. The main source of data for each avenue is respectively Spotify and YouTube. To factor in the growing impact of multiple Asian countries where these platforms aren't always the go-to site for music streaming, more sources have been added.
In order to account for their real popularity in each relevant country, the below sources have been used along with the mentioned ratios that reflect the market share of each area.
Audio Streams
– South Korea : Genie streams * 3.05 (consistent with Gaon streaming numbers)
– Japan : AWA streams * 100/5.5 (AWA has 5.5% of the Japanese streaming market)
– Elsewhere : Spotify streams * (370 – 8.5 – 9.5 – 33 - 9) / 207 (370 million global subscribers minus 8.5 million from South Korea minus 9.5 million from Japan minus 33 million from China divided by the number of Spotify only users minus 9 million more Asian users) + Genie streams * 3.05 (uses Genie rather than Spotify to extrapolate markets like Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam)
Video Streams
– China* : Xiami streams * 125/6.5 (Xiami has just over 5% of the Chinese streaming market)
– Elsewhere : Youtube views
*since 96.4% of Chinese streaming platforms are free users, that paid-for users pay less than $2 a month and that they are also used as video streaming platforms, their streams are weighted in par with YouTube streams.
Audio Stream value – 1500 plays equal 1 album unit
Video Stream value – 11,750 views equal 1 album unit
Equivalent Albums Sales (EAS) = ( Spotify * 310/207 + Genie * 3.05*2 + AWA * 100/5.5 ) / 1500 + ( Xiami * 125/6.5 + YouTube ) / 11750
Top Hits
Considering how many years later streaming exploded, it is pretty insane to see Paparazzi barely 6th among the biggest songs from The Fame, in spite of a massive 209 million plays on Spotify and 475 million on YouTube
Bad Romance, Poker Face, Telephone, and Just Dance are all absolutely huge, with an average of 537,000 EAS apiece. The album stands at 3.3 million and keeps rising very fast.
Born This Way songs are undoubtedly on a lower scale but it still lands 3 songs in her top 20, most notably the title track at 339,000 EAS. It's an increase of 101,000 units in 16 months since our last update.
Applause leads tracks from Artpop while the now controversial Do What U Want is quickly vanishing from her top songs.
Impressively, Million Reasons climbed all the way to #5 among her top streaming hits. Of course, the market was healthier, but with the strong ongoing streams of her catalog hits, plus its own soft start, it was hard to expect such a nice conclusion.
As many as 4 songs from A Star Is Born joined this top 20, with Shallow dominating. The track records more than 1.3 billion streams on Spotify, 2 billion on YouTube and large numbers in Asian platforms as well, good for 1.56 million EAS.
There are 3 songs from Chromatica which sneaked in the ranking as well, led by Rain On Me at 542,000 EAS, the 6th largest streaming hit of the singer, a ranking that is poised to improve soon.
A Star Is Born has now moved ahead of The Fame's total as it stands at 3,747,000 EAS, it gained 1.4 million since August 2019.
Full catalog breakdown
If you are familiar with the artist's catalog and want to check details of each and every song, you can access to all of them right here.
Keep yourself up to date
Our website provides you a fantastic tool which fetchs updated Spotify streams as you request them, use it to watch these results grow day after day!
Lady Gaga compilations 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.
The distribution process
How to understand this table? If you check this example of Monster Ball Tour Live, those figures mean it sold 550,000 units worldwide. The second statistics column means all versions of all the songs included on this package add for 3,612,363 equivalent album sales from streams of all types.
The second part at the right of the table shows how many streams are coming from each original album plus the share it represents on the overall package streams. Thus, streaming figures tell us The Fame songs are responsible for 87% of the Monster Ball Tour Live tracklist attractiveness, which means it generated 479,000 album sales. We then apply this concept to all compilations, live albums, music videos and EPs.
Compilations sales figures listing
Most of these releases are themed around her first era, including the top two sellers, one more sign of the terrific success of The Fame.
As a bonus, below is the breakdown of the million sellers.
Total Album (all types) Sales per Country
Lady Gaga Career CSPC Results
So, after checking all the figures, how many overall equivalent album sales has each album by Lady Gaga achieved? Well, at this point we hardly need to add up all of the figures defined in this article!
[xyz-ips snippet="updatedCSPCalbums"]
This is it! The Fame / The Fame Monster achieves the massive total of 35.6 million equivalent album sales, way higher than anything released since 2000, by anyone minus Adele.
Incredibly, this era leads all five format categories but one. The other releases section in particular means a lot.
In fact, as Lady Gaga's debut album was hugely successful, we notice how many side albums got milked during this era.
A Polar opposite, Artpop bombed so badly, that her label quickly moved to something else, as there was nothing to exploit, in any profitable way.
When we first studied the diva's discography, The Fame was responsible for more than 65% of her sales, which was worrying for her future.
A Star Is Born is changing the story though. At 7.7 million, it gives more consistency to her results. The share of her debut is still huge, but down to 52.0% at the moment.
Born This Way is a very successful album as well with over 12.6 million EAS plus solid ongoing streams.
At 2.25 million, results of Chromatica are mixed. They prove that Lady Gaga is still very relevant, more than a decade into her career, but the album failed to produce any truly big hits. It will keep climbing though.
That career total of Lady Gaga is up to 68.3 million equivalent album sales.
This total is up by 5.7 million since our last review on August 2019 and up by 14.0 million March 2018.
Singles CSPC results
The list is compiled in album equivalent sales generated by each song. Therefore, these figures are not merged units of singles formats. Instead, it includes weighted sales of the song's physical single, download, ringtone and streaming as well as its share among sales of all albums on which it is featured.
1. 2008 - Lady Gaga - Poker Face [The Fame / The Fame Monster] - 7,140,000
2. 2009 - Lady Gaga - Bad Romance [The Fame / The Fame Monster] - 7,100,000
3. 2009 - Lady Gaga ft. Beyoncé - Telephone [The Fame / The Fame Monster] - 4,880,000
4. 2008 - Lady Gaga ft. Colby O'Donis - Just Dance [The Fame / The Fame Monster] - 4,710,000
5. 2011 - Lady Gaga - Born This Way [Born This Way] - 4,120,000
6. 2018 - Lady Gaga & Bradley Cooper - Shallow [A Star Is Born] - 3,310,000
7. 2009 - Lady Gaga - Alejandro [The Fame / The Fame Monster] - 3,010,000
8. 2008 - Lady Gaga - Paparazzi [The Fame / The Fame Monster] - 2,770,000
9. 2011 - Lady Gaga - The Edge Of Glory [Born This Way] - 2,220,000
10. 2013 - Lady Gaga - Applause [Artpop] - 1,860,000
11. 2011 - Lady Gaga - Judas [Born This Way] - 1,730,000
12. 2008 - Lady Gaga - LoveGame [The Fame / The Fame Monster] - 1,640,000
13. 2011 - Lady Gaga - Yoü And I [Born This Way] - 1,510,000
14. 2016 - Lady Gaga - Million Reasons [Joanne] - 1,400,000
If you feel inspired by this list, we just created this CSPC Lady Gaga playlist on Spotify!
Discography results
Thanks to our new ASR (Artist Success Rating) concept, we know that her sales represent 23.04 million times the purchase of her entire discography. Coupled with her total sales, it translates into an ASR score of 225.
She is just below Coldplay but ahead of Rihanna.
Records & Achievements
- At 35,603,000 EAS, The Fame / The Fame Monster is the most successful album of the 2000s.
- At 12,635,000 EAS, Born This Way is the 4th most successful album from 2011.
- At 7,140,000 EAS, Poker Face is the 2nd most successful song from 2008.
- At 7,100,000 EAS, Bad Romance is the most successful song from 2009.
- At 1,265,000 pure album sales, The Fame / The Fame Monster (inc. EP) is the last million selling international album in Japan.
- At 80,260,000 downloads and ringtones, the era The Fame / The Fame Monster is the biggest ever in terms of digital singles sales.
- At 20,110,000 downloads and ringtones, the single Poker Face is among the 10 highest selling digital single of all-time.
- At 150 weeks in 2009, Lady Gaga broke the record for most weeks charted inside the UK Single Chart during a calendar year. She also led 2010 with 123 weeks.
- At 10 weeks, Shallow is the longest running #1 hit in US Digital Song Sales chart for a female artist.
- At 24 weeks, Shallow is the longest running #1 hit in Canadian Digital Song Sales chart. It holds the same record in France at 22 weeks.
NB: EAS means Equivalent Album Sales.
As usual, feel free to comment and / or ask a question!
Sources: IFPI, Spotify, YouTube, Discogs.
You may be interested in...
... Lady Gaga's streaming masters analysis
... checking out the upcoming artists or even voting for them!
... best-selling artists, albums, and singles
We have created amazing cross-artists tops. Click to see all CSPC and raw sales results compiled so far!
... similar artists
To put Lady Gaga's figures into perspective, click to reach career breakdowns of pop star divas:
You inflated these sales to the heavens. Britney is better and sold more. You should do something better with your time and life and not this pointless stuff. We have Billboard for this
I’m also assuming you made a typo on page 11 by listing Joanne at 90K units from digital sales, the same you listed C2C as.
Thanks for posting! Would you say Joanne is a comeback era in the same vein as Ray of Light, The Emancipation of Mimi, Circus, etc.? I've seen a lot of Gaga fans claim this and I'd like to hear your opinion.
Circus sold less than Beyonce's 4 which is considered a flop albums. Circus flopped hun. It isn't even multiplatinum in the states
thanks for this MJD.
you have a typo with JOANNE's digital euivalent tho. you have it at 324k.. i think that's not factoring the 1.5 in your analysis. thanks dear
Joanne is a comeback era in her name and brand. commercially it did well/decent if you consider that the album's genre ain't mainstream.
I'm assuming the HUGE ringtones download. he did the same to every songs from other artists.
Hi Denzel,
What's pointless is comments like "Britney is better and sold more". If you had spent more time on Billboard, maybe you would have understood what it is about a bit better. There is no "lies" or whatever, nor the Billboard provides Global figures. Poker Face increased because pre-2010 downloads in SK were estimated rather than let blank, the version LLG vs GLG Radio Mix was added to it (which sold wonders in Japan) and because it out-performed Ringtones averages with over 1,4 million sales in the US.
Hi Chrysalynne Lingling!
Joanne did OK, but it was nowhere near a comeback like the ones you mentioned. All of them outperformed their predecessors by 2 to 1 or more, Joanne did much less than Artpop. It did slightly better than C2C, but the same fans argued (correctly) it wasn't a proper album to explain its low sales, so in order to be consistent in terms of popularity evolution we need to compare Joanne to Artpop and it did definitely worse than this one.
but you have PI - 450K plus MR - 1.53M plus Other tracks - 1.23M = 3.21M which is equal to 481.5k album equivalent not just 324k.
Thanks.
this is such a childish comment from an OGH I guess? bring this bitterness to SYG
Mexico (Amprofon) doesn’t include streaming for albums certifications. Just for singles. (Amprofon announced in Dec. 2016 that streaming was now included for singles certifications, they never said anything about albums).
Joanne was certified Platinum there three weeks ago (you can check it in Amprofon’s Facebook page) for 60k copies.
Even if streaming was included for certifications there (which it isn’t), 20k copies in Mexico (as you posted) would mean 33% of that certification coming from sales and 67% from streaming, which is absurd.
Your figures for some European countries are reeeeally low.
Same for Million Reasons.. 1.5 million worldwide when it has sold close to 1.2 million in US alone...
The Other tracks at 1,23m was from a copy/paste of Artpop, Joanne's remaining songs did 180k, it is sorted right now!
On page 4 you have The Fame sales at 15,920,000 but then on the overall albums sales comments you have it at 15,820,000.
The studio albums sales (without EPs or Remix Albums) add 27,290,000, which should be rounded to 27.3, not 27.2, as you posted.
Funny thing is I’m looking now at your previous Gaga analysis from 2016 and you have downgraded basically all her figures... despite the SuperBowl boost for her catalog. Not only they’re not up but they’re down! Lol.
The Fame was at 16.2 in 2016 according to you and now it’s at 15.92...
The Remix was at 1.5 million and now 1.45...
BTW was at 6.9 million and now 6.71...
Artpop was at 2.2 million and now 2.11...
C2C was at 1.4 million and now 1.33..
Hi Nympho,
It isn't because Amprofon is a mess at communicating updates that you should assume streaming isn't included. Do you seriously believe that Avicii, who haven't even chart in the sales ranking, can be certified with pure sales? Of course not. They have been including streaming since 2 years which is why Drake, Weeknd, Calvin Harris, etc. suddenly got tons of Platinum awards. Let's get real, Post Malone's Stoney has been certified Plat at the same time as Gaga and his album hasn't even been released in Mexico.
If you doubt that they are a mess at providing accurate guidelines for their awards, just check their PDF file which doesn't even mention Streams are included for singles too. Just like CAPIF reduced its Gold / Plat criteria in Argentina to 15/30k in 2013 and 10/20k in 2016 and people online continue to use 20/40k just because it wasn't properly announced.
The 33% isn't absurd but logical, streaming is massive in Mexico due to huge YouTube usage and the large population in comparison to a weak music market. In 2016, the physical segment grossed $32 million in Mexico, nearly 3 times less than digital revenues at $89 million. Sales in Mexico are lower than in Austria, do you think that every rapper/DJ can sell 100k there on pure sales alone, while they can't get 5k in Austria? A bit of common sense is needed. Inside the sales chart, Joanne was the 52th top seller of 2016 in Mexico which means about 14k sold. It failed to chart in 2017.
As for MR, I'm 100% sure you are perfectly aware it performed nowhere near as well in Europe than in the US so why do you want to extrapolate its sales from there to the globe? It completely failed to chart in SK, it peaked at #29 in a dead French market before collapsing, it never went higher than #85 in Germany, etc. What do you expect? Also, it is confirmed at 1,1m in the US rather than 1,2m, don't forget that Complete My Album sales are excluded from RTD figures of Soundscan.
180k is what A-Yo alone must have sold worldwide.
Canada: 2,300 - 6,000 - 3,000 (11,300)
US: 7,000 - 30,000 - 18,000 (55,000)
France: 350
UK: 8,332
It sold close to 80k in its first weeks in those 4 countries alone (it charted in the main singles charts or the downloads charts of several other countries as well).
180k for all the album remaining tracks worldwide, 1.5 years later it’s not accurate at all.
The typo on TF has been fixed. Studio albums add for 27,19m.
It isn't funny but expected by everyone following sales figures. In recent times, we learned a lot of things including the (faster than elsewhere) collapse of Asian markets as well as eastern Europe markets. Basically, every small market on which it was possible to sell decently 20 years ago is now almost fully relying in streaming since majors do not invest money anymore on them. In the same way, Scandinavian figures have been adjusted since they too have been almost exclusively streaming for several years now. Everything has been detailed inside the Fixing Log article so the funny thing would be to see some artist go down and some others don't if I change the same formulas.
What's also funny is that when adjustments conclude on increases just like DL sales of The Fame singles you don't complain. I wonder why?
What about some seriousness rather than blind fanatism while talking about figures, nympho? You perfectly know that A-Yo dropped very fast afterwards, completely disappearing from the US Top 1000 in no time. No doubt you also know that it sold these units while it was a promotional single, meaning all people who then bought the album with the Complete My Album functionality (which basically all fans jumping on promo singles do once the album is available in full) are later excluded from these figures. I'm sure you also know album cuts failed to chart in all relevant DL markets when the album came out and they did 1/2k each in the US only. So, what would be accurate, assuming zillions of copies have been sold? Once again, let's be realistic for a minute please.
What does it have to do the Asian markets collapsing now or Scandinavian countries being mostly streaming based to you downgrading sales for albums released in 2008-2011 when streaming didn’t even exist?
Makes no sense. That affects albums released in the last few years, not a decade ago.
And yes, it’s funny because you decided to increase other artists’ sales in recent updates instead of downgrading them... It should be the same for everybody, right?
I just read in a comment here that you decided to include Ringtones in digital singles... and thus the increases. Why should I complain about that? Seems logic. IFPI included them. You should have done it before.
What it’s not logic is 2008-2011 album sales going down from one article to another because the market is dead now and dominated by streaming...
Hey! I have two questions: first one, did you forget to add “Eh, Eh” to the Digital Singles page? I feel like it sold more than the album tracks on the list. Also the 15M for “The Fame” include sales from “The Fame Monster” correct? So why add those sales again in “Other releases”?
Thanks!
You are completely off the mark. It seems you don't really care about what's true / real but I'll still take the time to give you a detailed explanation.
My historical formulas were compiled more than a decade ago - I started to study deeply records sales way back in 2003. By then, the market was global with tons of tiny countries doing well. When some relevant market had a notable up / down, I adjusted it, but without going through the market size of all minor countries again and again. While compiling Coldplay's article, I noticed my estimates were all a few percentages higher than the real figures from the label. So I went on into all figures, checking markets one by one, from all continents. I found out that small markets had collapsed much more than big ones, hence my figures extrapolating them from the known markets were concluding on inflated numbers. Naturally, I built more complex methods, taking into account the release date rather than using standard extrapolation factors for albums from all eras. I have been 100% transparent on all these matters, creating the Fixing Log article to show how it exactly works and providing the receipts that led me to adjust something.
That is why virtually all albums conclude on slight decreases. Just check Barbra's and Dire Strait's totals, you will see they are down from my 2010 estimates in spite of catalog sales. The rare cases of artists who still go up are the likes AC/DC who have catalog sales massive enough to off-set the adjustment in sales.
As for singles, ringtones have always been included. Here too I built more complex formulas to extrapolate ringtones as per the release year and the music genre, rather than a fixed amount. That's why singles from 2007-2009 go up since RTs were strong while 2013/2014 singles tend to go a bit down because RTs dropped faster than expected. Once again, it has been fully explained multiple times and the same process was applied to all artists.
