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Hi Jorge!
To be honest I'm surprised at your comment about Madonna, Celine and Whitney. Since 2001 to date, Mariah is similar to Madonna and Celine in that they have one strong seller around 10m (TEOM / COADF / ANDHC), and then albums down to 2-4m for all of them, and recent albums much lower. The only one different is Whitney, as her two releases since 2001 hasn't done well.
What we can say instead is that Mariah secondary albums sold 2m-ish while Madonna's and Celine's are more on 3m-ish, but then she has different, younger demographics which gave up purchasing albums earlier, and like Raffi said she had a larger share of her sales coming from markets which collapsed strongly in early 00s.
Hi Kiimi!
I think I've though about it a dozen of times while doing the study, but still managed to forget to add it! So no, Chinese sales aren't included in these 185k sales, and the 'Other LP' line should be added. I'll just wait a couple of days for more typos to be evidenced and then I'll fix the 3-4 flaws.
Hi Winston68!
The Beatles are definitely in the pipeline, although this can take a bit of time as we will also publish the CSPCs for all solo members. There are also a lot of activity lately with many top current singers returning soon, so we may push some easy updates for them in-between!
Hi Gus!
As Denysanatol said, the 19.2m includes everything (including sales of albums/comps thanks to the track) and is expressed in equivalent album sales. AIWFCIY's EAS from streams is 2.66m, which would be 26.6m equivalent singles sales. I'm really not a fan of equivalent units expressed in singles though, as they are mostly used to inflate totals by media, it's not a metric used in the industry.
Hi Smiley!
To be honest I wouldn't put my hand on it, in recent months we noticed several files which had some errors in parts of the formula for the ASR, and as numbers are indirect it's not easy to just look at numbers and point out the flaws. We will have a better view once Madonna/Celine are updated. Anyway total sales of Madonna/Celine/Mariah/Taylor are now in a 20% range, so even if Madonna maintains a healthy lead in absolute terms success wise they are all really strong.
Hi tsaotd!
I mentioned the state of the art in my comment to matt, and about Asian sales there are still room for improvement really as Mariah is incredibly poorly tracked given her success. Improvement in terms of accuracy, that doesn't mean numbers can only go up.
Anyway as it stands, the main deflated market by her fans is likely Indonesia, indicators are really good there. Our calculations add for 1.86m in this market, including 100k+ for every studio album up to Rainbow included, and 200k+ for MB/Daydream/Butterfly. Here are country totals, again subject to change in the future as the quality of data continues to improve:
4.58m South Korea
2.32m Taiwan
1.86m Indonesia
1.44m China
1.17m Philippines
1.12m Malaysia
0.84m Thailand
0.77m Singapore
0.72m Hong Kong
0.12m India
In other forums, someone posted that she has sold about 80k more than Celine in the 90s, even though Celine's articles were last updated in 2016 😂
Hi Chartmasters, can you add MTV Unplugged sales in the country section? The RIAA counts it as a studio album, and it is very important for Mariah's sales in America and Europe 🙂
I expected her numbers would go up, but 15mln more is much more than I thought. Her catalog have aged very well, and not just the Christmas material. What is happening with several album cuts from E=MC2 and Memoirs also tells me that the reason for their initial underperformance was likely a wrong choice of singles. Glad those records are now getting a well deserved re evaluation.
Hi MJD!
I have to say, I'm quite surprised at how you mentioned updating Mariah's stats was more difficult than Sinatra's considering the vast catalog size of the latter! Still, I have to say, it paid off quite well, as not only is the updated article so much more comprehensive, but the fact you did so much to analyze data and correct past oversights shows how far Chartmasters has become!
Honestly, seeing Mariah's updated article feels kinda nostalgic considering I was 16 when the first article came out, and it's so funny to see me reacting as hyped and positive for this article as the old one 7 years ago!
Keep up the good work MJD!
P.S. I have some questions/comments for you, but I see some have already been addressed in other comments, and I'm still dissecting this article, so I'll just gather my thoughts and type them out later.
Hi MJD!
I saw that you're currently reworking the article to find typos/add China sales/adjust total album sales, and I spotted a few that I would like to point out (in case you didn't find them):
#1 You mentioned everytime I close my eyes with babyface in the physical singles section, but you didn't include it there, although you did include it in the downloads section.
#2 Speaking of everytime I close my eyes, the streaming section also saw its total at 0 on both Spotify and YT. I also noticed some songs having wrong totals, like I'll be There at 96K streams on Spotify.
#3 In the Intro under The Emancipation of Mimi, "Several of its songs became hits, with We Belong Together remaining to everyone her unparalleled skills". I think you mean 'reminding everyone of' rather than 'remaining to everyone'
#4 That’s 147 million worth of sales released in 7 years only, plus the stand-alone singles issued during this period! I think you meant 'minus' rather than 'plus', as the 6 albums from 1990-1997 add up to over 147 mil alone.
#5 I noticed I know what you want achieving 400K+ downloads, but if I recall, you had it at 1 mil in the old article, right? I find the new figure kinda hard to believe considering its good streaming stats.
There are also some grammatical errors here and there, but not too bad that it's noticeable. Overall great job on the artice!
I do have 2 comments regarding the methodology:
#1 Different tracklist in different countries
I'm sure you encountered this before from other artists, but with Mariah, I recall #1's having a different tracklist in Japan, where AIWFCIY is included. Normally, this isn't an issue, but in this case, I feel it's quite significant considering that almost 4 million of #1's 16 million sales come from this country, where AIWFCIY is arguably her biggest hit and likely convinced consumers to purchase this album there. In this case, how would you assign sales of the compilation?
#2 Adding tracks from bonus/deluxe editions
I recall the earliest discussions of this topic during Dua Lipa's article, where you mentioned that it's fine to add deluxe tracks into the final total of an album, considering that a good chunk of those songs' to-date streams was achieved after they were added to the album, so it's fine.
I'm mentioning it here because I noticed you put I Know What You Want as part of the Charmbracelet album. To me, I have no problem with its downloads and streams added to the album total, as both were achieved after the track was added to the album.
The main problem is extrapolating the individual EAS units for songs, in which 82.4% of Charmbracelet's streams comes from IKWYW, so the song was assigned 2.5 million of the album's 3.03 million sales. But as I recall, the album achieved most of its sales way before IKWYW was added to the deluxe edition, and Through The Rain was the one that drove Charmbracelet's album sales during Q4 of 2002. In this case, I feel that the popularity of individual songs is distorted if we use stream % to assign sales to individual songs.
I get that for recent albums, it doesn't matter much as pure album sales are already low, but for older albums, especially those with songs that blow up suddenly in streaming (i.e. It's A Wrap for Memoirs) might inflate their EAS. What do you think?
Also I think her post TEOM eras have an extremely messy rollout, both e=mc² and TMB had higher peaks/debuts in most countries than both TEOM and WBT, showing she still had some massive hype, but the era went downhill as soon as she released Bye Bye as the second single, by the time I'll Be Loving You Lopng time was released people probably forgot she even had released an album, also not touring didn't help at all, both taking chances and hard candy got a huge boost for their tours while mariah didnt even do that.
With Memoirs it got even worse, as the hype wasn't there anymore, but the era was still handled badly, for example in the UK she released the album 3 months after its US release so even though she did a lot of promo, and even performed at huge TV shows, by then no one was anticipating the album there
Do you think that, adding the solo stuff with the Beatles release, the Beatles could actually come close to the famed 1 billion claim, at least in unweighted terms?
Agreed! I honestly find E=MC2 to be the most disappointing in her entire catalog, considering it was the follow-up to the massive TEOM, plus the era started off strong with TMB, and yet the album quickly fizzled out after its first month or two. It kinda killed the momentum that she established, and I feel that had the album been a bit bigger, it would have likely pushed TEOM and her 90s catalog to higher numbers. Not to mention various tracks on the record (e.g. Migrate, I'm That Chick) sounded like bonafide smashes that suited radio and crossover appeal at the time.
The lack of touring also didn't help there, but she never was a touring act to begin with, and she always managed to sell huge amounts with few tour stops in the 90s and 2000s.
There are some upsides to these albums though. Plenty of its songs have garnered virality in recent years that allows it to accumulate decent EAS from streams, and it seems that TMB and Obsessed (and honestly, most of her 2000s output) hold up just as if not better than most of her 90s output.
Also, looking at AWA and QQ streams, I'm quite surprised about how big the numbers for the E=MC2 singles were! It's a shame the album market in these countries were really dire during this time.
