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@boxfresh87 that's not how it works, you are mixing records and equivalent album sales. Say 20 million downloads, they are worth 3 million, so "records" sold will always be much higher than actual CSPC units, which are album-equivalent units. As for Shakira, it's not about opinions but numbers. She has plenty of successful records, she sold well in Latin America during the 90s, enjoyed the last years of huge CD sales in early 2000s, got global smashes in both physical singles and downloads, and has tremendous streaming numbers both audio and video. It all adds up.
One best selling artist that I noticed that is still missing is Lionel Richie. Once you add him i think that about covers the main top 100.
Popular 1950's to add: Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Buddy Holly, Bill Haley & His Comets, Sam Cooke, Ruth Brown, James Brown, Dean Martin, Perry Como, Nat King Cole, Etta James, Brenda Lee, Patti Page, The Everly Brothers, Bo Diddley and Jerry Lee Lewis
Popular 1960's artists to add: Jefferson Airplane, Otis Redding, Smokey Robinson, The Temptations, Four Tops, Martha & The Vandellas, Gladys Knight, The Marvelettes, Peter Paul & Mary, Dusty Springfield, the Byrds, The Kinks, The Animals and The Hollies.
Popular 1970's artists to add: The Who, Al Green, The Spinners, KC & the Sunshine Band, Gloria Gaynor, Chic, Jethro Tull and Steely Dan.
Popular 1980's artists to add: Heart, The Cars, Lionel Richie, Kool & The Gang, The Pointer Sisters, Run-D.M.C., Public Enemy, N.W.A., LL Cool J, Eric B. & Rakim, Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five, Cyndi Lauper, Culture Club, Pet Shop Boys, Thompson Twins, Steve Winwood and Tears for Fears.
Popular 1990's artists to add: Smashing Pumpkins, Soundgarden, Alic in chains, Nine Inch Nails, Tool, Brandy, Monica, The Notorious B.IG., Dr. Dre, A Tribe Called Quest, Beastie Boys, Blur, The Verve, Seal and Lenny Kravitz
Popular 2000's artists to add: Ashanti, T-Pain, Outkast, Ludacris, T.I., Nelly, Lupe Fiasco, The White Stripes, The Strokes, Queens of the Stone Age, Fall Out Boy and Sean Paul.
Popular 2020's artists to add: H.E.R., Giveon, Phoebe Bridgers, Boygenius, Chappell Roan, Glass Animals, Florence + The Machine and Maneskin
Why so little love for the 2010s? 🙂
Lionel Richie will be among the following 3 acts to be studied in full (with The Who & Bing Crosby). Once these are treated, I agree the top 100 will be complete. I'm regrouping all interesting artists right now to see which genre/subgenre has the most missing artists to publish lists as I did for metal, country, and rap. Apart from the big three missing, I'll also soon add the remaining 18 from the voting leaderboard that have yet to be studied (although many instrumental/local acts are less popular among readers, obviously).
haha I've noticed that most of the main artists from the 2010's are already added so i didn't feel the need to add any additional. Its hard because there are SO MANY artists over the course of history. But I think as long as we are getting all the main ones then that is half the battle. LOVE what youre doing! keep up the good work! 🙂
Are you guys aware that Grok, ChatGPT & co are now using chartmasters as a source very frequently? Many fan sites across social media do as well. It’s incredible how far you you‘ve come. But unfortunately, most ppl who encounter your stats still don’t ever understand how to interpret them. They always mistake total EAS for total record sales which leads them to dismiss your numbers as inaccurate, which is so frustrating bc you guys really do provide the most accurate data we have available.
I think it would help if you included a table here ranking artists based on total pure records sold, showcasing those numbers, since that is ultimately the data most ppl only ever care about. Technically all the information is already here, but not added up. Like Madonna has sold 146,450,000 albums, 64,420,000 LPs, 75,210,000 physical singles & 42,100,000 digital singles. That would be +328 million pure records sold.
Ofc the EAS figure is a much more accurate way to rank an artist‘s overall success bc it’s all weighted, but total pure record sales are definitely far more interesting, valuable & comprehensible for the general public who are not familiar with your site or the EAS methodology. I think it would help you gain more recognition.
I kinda agree with this @styralex; at first I was all-in on educating people, but when it's too difficult to digest it ends up missing the point rather than helping for real. I'm not mad at lists merging albums and physical singles sales, I still find it difficult to simply combine downloads as the scale is so different from album sales, but I'm in the process of accepting that idea 🙂
Saw that for Grok / ChatGPT, well, if they want to be accurate, they better use us for a source rather than any other site 😉 ChartMasters is to music what Forbes is for networths, or Transfermarkt for football players' valuations ; we accept the fact that the 'official', 'real' figures do not and will never exist, so we focus on estimating with an independent and sharp process all numbers, to put everyone in a comparable scale. Obviously, when a site is just getting started, it requires time until people validate it as a valuable source, and that's fine; it's important to be a doubter, especially online. Now, CM is running for nearly 10 years so there are more and more users that know our methods are strong, we aren't making up stuff, nor focused on one artist or another. It's all about building comprehensive, reliable lists.
This is kind of similar to what I was saying to you years ago, when proofing the articles, about reducing the general history write ups. I felt it was distracting away from the numbers and thats what people really want to see, you disagreed lol.
I'd prefer to see the articles just containing written information specifically relating to an artists, sales and streaming and it's relation to the market, others artists, themselves, all time, genre etc.
Actually, it's the opposite ^^
Figures and formulas-heavy articles are much harder to digest, while articles that write a story surrounding numbers work much, much better. Many CSPCs could get below 1,000 pageviews when they were strictly focused on numbers. When we add more comments and the artist's history to provide context, there are never fewer than 3,000 distinct users reading them. The recent metal lists (albums and artists), which are written as stories rather than a database of numbers, topped 20,000 each; the article on rap's best-selling artists went even further, as it got over 100,000 views in a week.
Could that not be more to do with them being more visible, more words, appearing in more searches. As oppose to people actually coming because of the histories.
Of course, it's a good part of it, but even CTR (click-through rate) and rebound stats (people leaving fast) are way worse on metrics-heavy figures. It's more convenient for regular users, but outside of the perhaps 50-100 persons like us who are very familiar with all these numbers/pages, people need more context and fewer numbers to appreciate the reading, and ultimately take something from it.
That's why we added the summary at some point, this way regular readers who come see updated numbers from a specific CSPC daily or so can jump straight to the final results.
Technically maybe. There are artists who haven't been updated in almost a decade and who haven't even counted their collections. I think the Eagles and AC/DC are among them. So it's worth remembering that the update doesn't happen daily as you might think, but there are a large number of artists rated in 2016 and a little later. Remember the surprising rise of the Beatles a moment ago.
AC/DC don't have live numbers that justify 209 million EAS, unlike U2 who have stratospheric live numbers.
There is no logic in that statement, as live attendances have no direct bearing to sales. I mean take The Beatles, Elvis, Zeppelin, Floyd, Jackson, Eminem, Queen, Sinatra etc, these artists are the most successful sellers of all time, all more successful than U2, yet none of them come anywhere near to U2s live attendances.
I compared two artists with similar and still existing numbers, given that live box office receipts began to gain a strong relevance after the 70s.
But you do not need box office recepts to know The Beatles, Zep, Floyd, Queen, Sinatra, Elvis and even later acts like Eminem, all outsold U2 and have way less concert attendances. You can look at say Led Zeppelins 70s tours and although there are no reciepts for most of them, you can deduce rough attendances from the venues they were playing and see that they come nowhere near U2s, yet Zep sold more. Obviously Zep and U2 have very similar sales and streams, yet U2 smashes Zeps live attendances to bits.
People before the 80s didn't have a live concert mentality yet, and U2 certainly wouldn't have had the same numbers back then.
