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Hi RLAAMJR!
Please, not that dumb Celine-fanatical argument of "if you don't count Titanic for her, you should exclude all soundtracks to all singers" again.
Hi Marta!
We constantly review every figure, the point is not to look at new sales and add to former estimates while in-between new data emerges showing that adjustments are required. Our formulas are more and more complete / complex as time go by, the fact that it brings such tiny changes show that they are now fairly solid. It's always the last values that must be considered.
Then, if the extrapolation formula changes the total of only 1%, considering how much downloads are dead now, catalog sales aren't enough to off set them. For example 1% of Poker Face is 200k, while old songs are happy to sell 1k in a week in the US.
Hi but!
I can't read the content as I'm not an ATRL member. Anyway, that board is a monstrous flow of delusion, it's filled with fanatics who feed themselves with their stannism / hate. They live in a parallel world where 100% of the global population speak, think and breathe depending on who they are rooting for. The simple title "bias exposed" just shows how insanely childish their approach is.
I'm a married man now, way too old for long to care about absurd diva wars. The funny thing when I read these comments is that Britney fans will say I'm her hater because I stan Bey, Bey fans say I deflate her because I stan Britney, Madonna fans say I must be a fan of Mariah since my numbers are so low, Gaga fans that I stan Madonna, etc, etc. The only thing safe with ATRL is that 100% of divas fanbases claim I'm a hater of their fave because I stan her rival. It's simple to understand, they all believe insanely inflated numbers so anything realistic must be "bias" from a "hater". Just goes on to show how pointless all this can get really.
Well this time around, it's Lady Gaga fans accusing you of inflating Britney Spears sales.
The only point worth addressing is why you used the awards listed in Britney's official promo booklets in the recent update as they seem to think they are mere tabloids or teen magazines of no value. I know you challenged the certifications and found them to be legit. Can you explain the process for the doubters?
The rest of the claims are based on their ignorance on how club sales worked and such.
Let's not pretend like you don't have a bias against Queen Nicki though.
She's literally the most requested artist by a large margin and yet you prefer studying forgotten 70s rock bands like Supertramp.
Hi but!
I'll answer to a larger question about which sources are reliable or not, since it's clear that a lot of people is highly misinterpreting the information.
The first point that I recently explained on Twitter and in the past in the website, is that we should never mix sources and reporters. Soundscan, labels' financial reports, Spotify, RIAA, etc, are sources. Figures are originated by them, they have bills / databases extracts / audits to back them up. Billboard, Forbes, or even the Guiness, are reporters. They do not create anything. Whatever they claim, they do it on behalf of someone else.
In a single Billboard article, you can found references to a RIAA cert, a Soundscan figure and a global sales figure. The source to these 3 claims isn't Billboard, instead there is 3 sources, the RIAA (for US shipments), Soundscan (for US over the counter sales), and the label or a manager (for global sales claims).
It would be easy to assume that anything posted by Billboard is 100% official, it's not though. Why?
This brings me to the second concept that is fundamental to understand in order to know which sources are reliable or not, which is the legal value of a source. By definition, reporters have no legal value. They aren't responsible of figures, so they can't have. That's why saying "Billboard said it so it's official" is deeply incorrect, and I don't even mention how many freelance writers post stuff on Billboard's site nowadays.
Organizations like RIAA and Soundscan have contracts with labels / the industry, their data have to be valid as required inside the agreements between all parties. In the same way, when a label posts an official communication, like when they announce a new album, these reports have legal value. Basically, if Sony says "Britney Spears will release her Nth album in xx/yyyy, she has sold 70 million albums to date", then Britney Spears can go to court and got extra money if she hasn't got royalties for 70 million album sales. It doesn't mean labels can't be tricky, like when they say "Baby One More Time album sold 30 million copies", to point out that records of tracks out of the album add for 30 million discs.
Another trick is managers. They are often the cause of most of the misunderstanding on this matter. Reporters like Billboard contact them as easily (or even more) as responsibles at labels, and they do represent an artist, so it makes the job for reporters to get a credible source on their articles. Managers have no legal value though. They do not represent labels, but instead artists, they are paid by them, like a tennis player who picks a personal coach. In concrete words, managers are free to claim anything they want, and since their main target is to promote their artist they won't deflate their results, more like the opposite.
With these two concepts, you can understand which sources are 1/ accurate 2/ official. A promo booklet is sent by labels to retailers to convince them to buy some new products. Do they come from a source or a reporter? A source. Do they have legal value? Clearly, yes. Is a claim inside a Billboard article reliable? Well, is their own source something with a legal value? Not always, and global sales claims are precisely the kind of claims that come 90% of the time from managers, so no, they aren't official figures nor reliable!
Hi "That's the Tea"!
What about: let's not pretend that the entire world is filled with childish people who want "tea" day in day out and can't get their eyes off their fave for a minute? Sorry if people bother about facts / the music industry without being interested in your pointless diva war and "bias" rubbish.
As for Nicki, the forgotten 70s rock band has 1 album which sold as much if not more than her entire discography. They outsold her by like 2.5 to 1 with maybe 3 times less songs. The ratio between the work involved and the CSPC result for Nicki is no doubt the worst out of all popular artists. There is literally artists who outsold her by 5 to 1 that take less time to compile and we still haven't got the time to study them still. Is it so hard to understand then why she is no priority, especially since like 90% of her votes come from one twitter fan account that asked their followers to drop a comment some months ago, people that will never go back to the site to see the results?
Wow. Sorry for being negative. I know that the album is still growing but I thought ASIB would have reached 10 million already, or at least 8. The album has strong consistency on the charts all over the world and it was receiving publicity like crazy. Even performing at the Oscars and Grammy. I really thought that this was going to be another A league album by Gaga. Guess i was wrong then.
Just my two cents...... full support to the ChartMasters team! You guys are doing a great job, just keep doing it further.
Welcome to 2019.. even Tu,N and WWFA,WDWG are still at ~5M
ASIB will likely hit 10M maybe in 3-5years
That’s totally wrong numbers... BTW are over 8M and A Star is Born surpasses global sales of 6M at June...
Yes! What I like with ATRL-type fanatics is that at least they are creative! If only they would use this creativity to more relevant works than making up silly conspiracy / hating theories :p
Hi Michael!
I'm not worried about the future of the album, it is going to keep rising at fast pace for quite some time, look at how The Greatest Showman is still going and it's nearly 1 year older!
I understand the feeling that the album was already higher. The thing is that many, many countries (the UK, Germany, France, Australia, Italy, etc) have dumb chart rules that exclude a lot of streams from album charts. They only count 12 songs, reduce the top 2 to the average, stuff like that. Ultimately, this inflates the run of albums which are strong pure sellers. That's why the run of A Star Is Born feels much bigger than other albums that may have similar or even higher totals. For example Post Malone's Beerbongs & Bentleys is quite comfortably ahead, but its runs on most album charts weren't that impressive.
It doesn't take a thing to the fact that ASIB is super successful, the point is about explaining why one could have expected even bigger numbers considering its immaculate chart runs!
