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A few years ago, I pointed out that some of her pure sales were underestimated. I particularly pointed out TEOM's asian sales. The admin swore up and down that I was completely in the wrong and they were accurate because it was off IFPI reports.
Today, with the new update, most of her sales are now extremely close to my old claims.
I also compared Dua Lipa to Drake saying that having the same Apple Music ratio in 2020 was delusional, and you guys replied that it was fair because Apple Music global and blah blah blah. Now he has a 50% bigger ratio than her.
I appreciate a lot what you guys do, but I hate how you're sometimes not able to admit mistakes at first.
Taylor high position is due to the streams, there is no way to compare her to Mariah/Madonna/Celine
I think they didn't add ep sales in total album sales but in other section.
Congratulations for your work as usual ! A deserved first update !... The Beatles for the next ones ?... Cheers !
according to CHARTMASTER, her 15 studio albums have sold around 122 millions copies.
they list her four best selling compilation records in total have sold around 29 millions copies(mtv, #1s, the greatest hits, the ballads).
if you add them up, you will get 151 millions copies in total without counting others EPs or minor release.
146 millions' literally from nowhere
That was my concern as well.. CM’s conclusion for Mariah is she’s now at 193 million equivalent album sales, 146 million from pure album sales, 7 million EPs, 3 million music videos, 40 million physical singles, 81 million downloads and ringtones, and 13 million equivalent album sales from streams.. yet I wasn’t certain if “MTV Unplugged” was what those sales for 7 million EPs were coming from, which is uncertain considering CM had it under “raw compilations” with #1’s, Greatest Hits, The Ballads.
Also, 64 records were listed with these under “raw compilations” so does that all count as physical sales? The total from these 64 entries totals to 34.8 M.. if yes, and is added to her 122M pure sales from her 15 studio albums (which I have concerns on these figures as well), that should put Mariah at about 157M in pure album sales.
Can someone add some clarity to this? Thanks!
Is there a reason why her post-Rainbow albums have such disappointing sales? Except for TEOM, all her albums from this century have mediocre results at best. And it gets worse if you compare these numbers with the rest of the big four (Madonna, Céline and Whitney)
Also, how good is Mariah as a catalog seller compared to the aforementioned divas?
MTV of probably an EP, and from the 64 compilations, a lot of sales are from video sales, which don't count as albums.
Hi Jorge,
Various reasons were listed in the article regarding why Mariah's pure album sales suffered post 2000, let's go over them on a case-by-case basis.
#1 Collapse of Various Asian Markets
From the 90s, it was evident that Mariah was much bigger in Asia proportionally (and often, in absolute terms) compared to Europe. Entering the 2000s, however, lots of markets outside of Japan in Asia saw a steep decline in album sales, like in South Korea or Taiwan, some of her strongest regions. The 2001-2005 albums all did 700K to 1 million there, respectable figures that puts Mariah among the top international sellers, but was still a far cry from her 90's success. Then, entering the late 2000's/early 2010's, the album sales market there was literally in life support, similar to how the South American album sales market have been in recent years. This strongly limited sales of E=MC2 and Memoirs, which from streaming results showed that those albums had solid hits in Japan and the rest of Asia!
You can refer to the "Britney Spears sales in Asia" article to see for yourself how dire album sales were during the 2000's.
#2 Downloads era
This is significant as when Mariah had her resurgence of popularity with TEOM, her back catalogue albums which should have received a boost was strongly limited to cherry picking songs. Her Greatest Hits set did well enough during this time, but predecessors like Glitter and Charmbracelet failed to accumulate higher sales during this time due to people opting to purchase individual songs instead. Then of course, while Mariah was struggling to sell albums in Asia during the late 2000s/early 2010s, she was still doing stellar numbers in downloads there, as shown by her 12 million plus sales of downloads in South Korea.
#3 Inconsistent Hits
It's no coincidence that TEOM, which is the only post 2000s album with multiple successful singles, is also the only album with nice album sales. Upon release, albums like E=MC2 (TMB), Memoirs (Obsessed) and Charmbracelet (TTR) have solid lead singles, but after that, follow up singles massively underperformed, only achieving minor success here and there, and as a result, failing to support album sales in the mid-run.
Then of course, streaming took over which led to new materials released in 2010s like MIAM or Caution to have extremely low pure sales. That, and of course, the fact that those albums failed to produce any significant hits (even #Beautiful, a solid Top 15 hit upon release, failed to withstand the test of time) plus Mariah is already in her 3rd decade in her career, saw Mariah's pure album sales decline more and more.
By the way, it's interesting that you compared Mariah's relatively poor album sales to Madonna, Whitney and Celine, and simultaneously point out her streaming results is huge, when those 2 are more related than you think! Mariah's career is relatively 'younger' than all of them, and her image/genre is more appealing to younger generations that fancy downloads/streaming rather than pure album sales. It's explains why Mariah have many songs compared to her peers that went viral in recent years like TMB, obsessed, It's A Wrap. If you compare Mariah's and Madonna's respective albums in the late 2000s/2010s, the latter may sell much more in pure sales, but Mariah's downloads + streaming almost equalizes their final CSPC amount!
Hi matt!
Why are you revisiting history so grossly?
1) Dua Lipa
You stated that you were "mad at how inflated" her streaming ratio was. You said it on the back of a terrible argument (AM album chart, with all the flaws we know). With the new model, the former ratio appears to have been spot on, as her extrapolation is 1.50781.
2) Drake
You say that I claimed you were "delusional", please provide a link for that. I answered to you that we were actually working on an artist specific ratio, and that Drake was going to be around 1.9 (indeed, he is at 1.95477). Everyone can read this answer. In the past I also mentioned that we can't use the rare data available for AM but it was based on first week streams, as we know that AM streams are more frontloaded than Spotify's. These data points were suggesting Drake was getting more streams on AM alone than on Spotify, our current artist ratio shows a completely different story, as all-inclusive his results aren't doubled. What I often said was that US AM impact was overstated, and their charts largely missunderstood. This was correct and still is.
3) TEOM Asian sales
The only message you posted about this subject was you suggesting that TEOM had sold 200k+ in China. The answer is: no, it hasn't, this was a made up figure. So was the 90k claim in the Philippines. You actually made claims on the back of made up stories, but even a broken clock gives the correct time twice a day.
You also pushed Emotions at 100k in Sweden, which is a typo, and claimed MelOn would be better to gauge Korean streams than Genie. Now you come here pretending you saw it all before anyone else and were right about everything. Hum.
And no, I've no issues at all admitting mistakes. There are typos in all articles, and that's precisely because I always reconsider everything unlike Mediatraffic or the OCC that our figures are so accurate right now. I even opened a log about updates, to explain mistakes as they were fixed, although it was too time consuming to maintain it. The thing about your rewriting of history seems to be more about you confusing answers which address an argument (TEOM in China, Apple Music album rankings, Drake's Scorpion debut numbers, etc) and the extrapolation that you do, and how you feel it about that extrapolated outcome at your end ("completely in the wrong", "swore up and down", etc).
This leads me back to TEOM sales, as this is a good example of a core issue there, which is the state of the art (of record sales estimations). Because there are two "errors": the good ones and the bad ones. Ironically, fans/readers mostly contest "good" errors, while the bad ones are virtually never identified. Let me explain it in full.
The good errors, are inaccurate estimations compared to the real values, but still the best possible estimations given the available data. Bad errors are real errors, meaning that with the available data, something has been misued/misinterpreted, leading to an error.
I took forever when updating Mariah's numbers, it was more of a pain than Sinatra's complete study. I digged local press from Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, etc, reviewed all Brazilian codes, converted a dozen more national charts into sales thanks to my algos, defined completely new and better indicators for ringtones numbers, and at last found a way to accurately gauge Japanese imports of all albums. Basically, I pushed the 'state of the art' further, because given our current accuracy standards at ChartMasters, more had to be done for Mariah considering her relatively much stronger impact in areas that aren't that relevant for most artists.
I was also mad at myself during this update because I saw way too many "bad" errors. In general, there are close to none. Which is why I answer in the negative to most people challenging the data: because based on the state of the art at a given moment, there are near no error. I know/use 100% of the information available here and there, it is properly interpreted (which is were fans usually get lost, as they do not have the experience to understand all the data and their specificities), without even mentioning all our backing tools.
Back at Mariah though, TEOM global estimate from 2017 was a "good" error, I'm perfectly fine with it. The estimate was the best possible, indeed fitting with the IFPI data and the interpretation we could do from it. I ignored the claims which suggested the IFPI data was incorrect (like that Chinese claim), and I was correct to do so. In truth, there have been only 1 element which changed the outcome, which is the fact that the available was actually available on clubs in the US, and that it sold so much there (an extra 5% roughly). This is now known thanks to Discogs, years ago the club editions were more often not even identified as such, it wasn't possible to know this stat. This US situation changes the barycenter of sales time-wise, which changes the 2005-release to date extrapolation and gave room to more sales worldwide. It doens't mean that former made up claims were true. Calculations based on various indicators/algos give 54k in China and 45k in the Philippines for it.
In the same way, fans were claiming Butterfly was over 1.5m in Japan due to a 1999 Sony Music Japan communication. My former numbers had it at 1.3m+, now revisited to near 1.6m. Yet, my former estimation was good. I knew by experience for reading several of them that these Sony Music Japan breakdowns were full of typos (iirc the one about Mariah itself lists Music Box as a 15m seller in the US), and considering Butterfly's tally of just over 1m and Mariah's trend for imports, 1.3m something was the best estimation we could set for this album in this country. Now, the state of the art evolves, and I've been able to twist Discogs to gauge the imports there. Butterfly did get a much larger share of imports there than the remaining albums. It ends up confirming the 1.5m+ figure. Of course, fans will say "we knew it!". Yes, just like they knew so many fake stats. Hence my reference to the broken clock. When a data looks fishy, it's an error to take it at face value, even if it ends up that this particular data was correct. In poker you can go all in with 72o and crack aces, it won't mean that was a good play.
While TEOM global sales and Butterfly Japanese units are two examples of "good" errors, as I said I was myself frustrated due to several bad ones during this update. For example, I used the US promotional campaign sales / release to date sales extrapolation for 'Mariah Carey' and 'Emotions' to estimate UK's up to date units, knowing their 90/91/92 sales, and then applied the same process from the UK to Australia. This was silly as hell. As both albums were already super big in the US upon release, they added a small percentage of sales later on. In the UK (& Australia), Mariah boomed with Music Box, so her previous albums added a way bigger amount of catalog units relatively speaking there, same in Australia. This leads me to the previous comment about addressing an argument. I remember answering about the recent 5xP cert of the debut in Australia to InnocentEyes (iirc) that we couldn't use the yearly ranking because it was points-based back then. That was/is true. Yet, a completely different issue (the original vs catalog sales ratio in the US vs UK/Oz) happens to justify the new cert. The Emotions Platinum cert was a typo instead, so this hasn't been changed. Goes on to show we need to carefully check each case, rather than just assuming everything is true.
Another really bad error was related to sales off charts, but still during the promo campaign. Say an album sells 5m in the US while on charts in the 90s, and 5.5m to date, and 50k while on charts in the Switzerland. It makes sense to expect it is at 55k to date in the latter market. This logic is flawed though if the album was promoted for 1 year and charted for 1 year in the US, while it charted for only 20 weeks in Switzerland. There are still 30-ish weeks of promotional efforts, where the album was potentially just outside the top 50, which adds a significant % of sales to its charted tally. That is the case of Butterfly, Rainbow or Glitter there for example, that's why their estimates are now healthier. This was a really bad error, completely avoidable, especially as it was replicated in multiple markets and albums. Total studio album sales in GSA countries went up by about 20%, that's wild.
For #1's, in 2017 I calculated club sales thanks to the 5xP cert minus soundscan units at the time, and then added up to date Soundscan tally. That's nice... but this misses entirely club sales after the last award (Jan 2003), while the comp was still selling there. That was another real bad error, and I would have got no problem 'admitting' it if it had been pointed out. There were more errors that I haven't in mind right now, and then about downloads and singles as well. The thing is that fans are often too busy trying to push some ludicrous narratives (TEOM 200k in China, the debut 10m in the US, 200m "according to Billboard" while it's a freelance journalist claim, etc) rather than really trying to look what's behind the number.
I appreciate it when people have a critical mind, it's a top quality to me, for real. And if you feel some frustration towards my messages, surely I'm responsible, as I always lack tact when speaking about numbers. Still, rewriting history is not nice, and your comment is clearly not honest intellectually speaking.
That's correct ClockingBell, MTV Unplugged's line is inside the EP block in the main sheet, which means it doesn't add up to the total album sales. To be honest, I see it myself as an album (the ratio is set at 1), so I'll likely just replace the line and re-upload the picture.
