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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!
Hi Nico!
Now that's wrong numbers 😉
Her management team dropped the 8 million figure very quickly after the release of BTW. My bet is that they did receive 8 million orders at the peak of the album's hype. Many were cancelled or returned though. By 31/12/2011, there was 6.8 million copies out there, and one year later when this number was reviewed, 900,000 more units had been returned, setting the effective number of units shipped during 2011 at 5.9 million. No need to say that it hasn't add 2.1 million in later years! Feel free to go through Vivendi financial reports to verify these numbers.
As for ASIB, it was up to 6 million using the American counting system. That one weights downloads lower than us (10 downloads = 1 album, while we apply 10 downloads = 1.5 album), but video streams much higher (11,750 to 1 for us, 1,500 to 1 for the US system). With this counting method, it is on exactly 7,000,000. Expect the RIAA to change this weighting in the future though since it makes little sense and most labels are fighting against it.
Did Lady Gaga's ASIB album boost sales/streaming of Barbra Streisand's ASIB album? Just wondering.
Not at all. I was just reacting when you said that
-- Lady Gaga went downhill but turn things the other way around with her ASIB album--
Because her ASIB album was released with a movie. So for me, I prefer to wait for her next studio album and compare its sales to her previous studio albums not supported with a movie, if she really has turned things the other way around.
Where did you get ASIB pure sales from. IFPI only reports units now. Please provide link to source of pure sales.
Their album lists are based on only pure sales, only their song ranking is SPS based.
Hi again Marta!
Anthony cross-checked the ASR file and in fact the dynamic table was messed up! The true ASR score of Gaga is 213, it has been fixed!
Hi Messiah!
There is 2 mistakes in your message. The first is your Soundscan data. You claim 760k sales to date while the album was on 775k in Feb 2018. The second error is to believe that Soundscan represents 100% of sales and that only their number matters. All figures are expressed in net shipments and there is obviously a few more thousands copies spread over the US that haven't been returned so far because retailers expect to sell them at some point. All communications / certifications have been using net shipments for decades, going with Soundscan sales for 1 country would be a massive flaw consistency-wise.
Hi but!
Vivendi used to publish the top 10 selling albums for the year plus the previous year up to 2013 in their annual financial reports. In the 2011 edition, Born This Way was shown as having ship 6.8 million during 2011. In their 2012 edition, it was shown with 'only' 5.9 million units during 2011.
You can read them here:
- Vivendi financial report for 2011
- Vivendi financial report for 2012
Hi headshot!
There is difference sources or methods for each country, you need to be more specific in your request! Which figures interest you?
In music industry, Southeast Asia represents the whole Asia outside Japan. If it was overshipped,as the sales figure stated here, it means that 1 million were retured in SEA, that figure was really too big.
Hmmm... I just wanna say that Nicki Minaj is the queen of rap and definitely has more EAS than some artists you have already studied.
Nicki has ruled rap music at some point and has longevity which no other female rapper was able to do.
So even if let's say she didn't have a lot of real votes, she deserves to be prioritized more still especially that she's still doing well on streaming.
Hi,MJD
Do you have reports from Warner and EMI in early years? I can't find them anymore. Also, IFPI deleted their database. This is painful. Digital Music Report 2012/2011/2010 etc and world music sales 2000/2001/2002 etc were all deleted. Plus, do you have market size data in Southeast Asia, Asia, Latin America, Middle East and Africa in 80s? Since they were nowhere to find online, this is so hard to estimate total sales in these markets.
Lady Gaga also outsold Beyonce and the gap between the 3 of them on total pure album sales is like 2 million or less.
So LG is currently above them but it's still possible for Bey and Rih to outsell her someday.
