Small updates:

- as seen in the Analysis section of the site, Seventeen has been posted

- EXO sales figures are completed at our end, should be online over the next days as we finish streaming retrieval and writing.

- we will mostly work on Pearl Jam next week

Just wondering,

Any plan to update ABBA? Would an update of their 2016 analysis make their numbers jump fairly higher?

They are not planned so far, not sure they would increase all that much to be honest as I remember already dealing with their off radar comps like the K-Tel ones in the US, as well as their Eastern releases. Also, disco-era artists never got releases through series. Obviously estimates would be thiner and more accurate overall if re-done now, but that can go both sides really!

As for other news, Pearl Jam's sales are finished, time to complete the tracklists of their comps and retrieve their streams now. Also, I did not communicate about it as the articles weren't updated entirely, but over the last weeks many pure album sales were added for new releases (big recent sellers plus some new CSPC releases like the last albums from Dua Lipa or Coldplay). That way the 'Top Albums' screens is more accurate, as well as some CSPC totals.

I have a request: a CSPC for one hit wonders. But rather than focusing on the artist's whole career, it focuses on works that include the one hit. And not just for "official" OHWs, but also artists that may have had other hits at the time but are only known for one song today (and are too small for their own article). Because it would primarily focus on one song from each artist, it could include multiple artists per article. Some examples from each decade could include

60s: Stand By Me (Ben E King); The Animals (House of the Rising Sun); California Dreaming (The Mamas and Papas)

70s: American Pie (Don McLean); I Will Survive (Gloria Gaynor); Escape (The Pina Colada Song) (Rupert Holmes)

80s: Never Gonna Give You Up (Rick Astley); Come On Eileen (Dexys Midnight Runners); Tainted Love (Soft Cell)

90s: Macarena (Los Del Rio); All Star (Smash Mouth); Iris (The Goo Goo Dolls)

00s: Hey There Delilah (Plain White Ts); A Thousand Miles (Vanessa Carlton); Chasing Cars (Snow Patrol)

10s: Somebody That I Used to Know (Gotye); Let Her Go (Passenger); Dance Monkey (Tones & I)

The idea would be about expanding the top songs list with major songs who's artists are probably never going to be covered.

Actually, I wanted to do just that a couple of years ago, but came to the conclusion that it wouldn't work. The main issue is that when artists have one ubiquitous hit, they will often have more compilations and lives albums than studio albums, all with the song on it. Studying that song effectively requires to go through 80% of the artist discography. Also, to be really accurate, it's worth it to study all albums, even studio, to know about when the artist rebounded, when cheaper versions were released, etc. These less successful albums bring valuable indicators to gauge album sales (like Discogs' owners to sales ratio), as their sales are more visible (they don't sell much once they drop out of charts), unlike the album that contains the huge hit and kept selling for long. 

The only cases where it's doable with a relevant gain in study time is for relatively recent songs, like Gotye's or Tones & I's, but with very low album sales these songs' CSPC units won't be anywhere near hits like Rolling in the Deep, Shake it Off, etc. So the whole interest in studying them goes down too.

That makes sense. Even if those artists don't get a CSPC analysis, I'd still be interested in seeing the pure sales of their songs to see where they rank on the physical and digital song sales rankings. Making those particular lists more "complete" shouldn't require extensive looks at the rest of those artists discographies and so should be less time-consuming. Do you think that could work?

Speaking of artists who won't get proper articles, I'm quite interested in comparing the song and album sales of British girl groups like Girls Aloud, Sugababes, All Saints, Atomic Kitten etc. I imagine none of them are at 10M, but similar to how we got articles comparing the song and album sales of the Beatles, do you think we could have a stand-alone article listing the best selling physical singles, digital singles and albums by British girl groups globally? I wonder how many groups besides the Spice Girls scored million-sellers...maybe the list wouldn't be long. Do you think that'd make for a worthwhile article?

Thank you! (and to clarify, I'm not the person who asked the original question)

In lieu of that, you think it’d be possible to do a complete article on the top selling physical singles of all time? Similar to the top selling digital songs. If not that, a fact check on the Wikipedia article for highest selling singles of all time?

The main issue for physical singles is that many of the all-time top sellers are actually pre-Rock era singles, from the likes Bing Crosby, Jimmy Dorsey, Tommy Dorsey, Patti Page, etc. These artists have monumental discographies, with a lot of specificities. 

I like the idea of using Beatles' articles templates to explore other themes, although that is more complex that it seems too. If we take the example of the girl groups, on the surface it looks that very few had million sellers. In truth The Andrews Sisters alone likely had more million sellers than the Spice Girls. The Chordettes, The McGuire Sisters, The Supremes, The Shirelles, The Marvelettes, The Crystals, LaBelle, The Weather Girls, The Bangles, Salt-N-Pepa..., just writing down some names going through my head. There are countless artists concerned, and these are only international ones, if we start looking at Japanese ones it's a never ending list.

Still, the priority for the year is the content (as opposed to the tools), so we may be looking at adding many pages like the best selling 80s albums, 70s singles or whatever, and that would fill in some of the most sizable holes in the data as it stands now. Suggestions are clearly welcome!

Small update - I've updated Kendrick Lamar's pure sales, Anthony will work on his updated streams as soon as he finishes Pearl Jam. We are updating him as he is the biggest rapper that still hasn't the artist ratio used, which downgrades quite significantly his sales, so we are fixing that!

Yeah, I think an all-time girl-group list would be quite challenging at this point in time. That's why I thought narrowing it to just British girl-groups might be simpler. Or maybe focusing on a particular decade like the '00s? I think that'd be quite fun. But it sounds like you've already got a lot stuff lined up, so looking forward to it all!

Hi all, not sure since when this has been going, but I just noticed that the code calculating the career CSPC total of artists was overlooking the downgrade of downloads for features - which gave extra millions to artists that have got many of them. I've fixed it now, so don't be surprised if you see several totals going down.

In other news, the update of Kendrick Lamar (the last rapper who had yet to be updated with the artist ratio) is posted. Also sales of the Carpenters are mostly done, so this is advancing pretty well.