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.

So after publishing Carpenters and Foreigner lately, I've started to complete the leaderboard with raw estimates to at last get a comprehensive ranking!

The first batch from today includes the following artists. No breakdown are available, only totals per format to feed the all time table and the new Artist Dashboard feature ratings.

Herbert Grönemeyer
Michel Sardou
Blondie
The Corrs
The Smashing Pumpkins
Hikaru Utada
Jimmy Buffett
Duran Duran
Creed
New Kids On The Block
Radiohead
Lenny Kravitz
Eros Ramazzotti
Faith Hill
Luther Vandross
James Taylor
Mary J. Blige
Tim McGraw
The Offspring
Dixie Chicks
James Last
Boyz II Men
Reba McEntire
Alan Jackson

I would love to read sales articles about Lionel Richie/Commodores (I assume both beyond 100M EAS aggregated), Chicago (more than 100M EAS? Dunno!), Cliff Richard (I have absolutely no idea how much he's sold so far), Al Jarreau, Dave Grusin and Brand X (all three rather niche artists, but I adore them personally).

How likely are the raw estimates to match the final total for the respective artists?

If entirely studied tomorrow, numbers would likely change in a way similar than when we update 2016/2017 articles, maybe a bit less. Numbers are nowhere near as precise as new CSPCs, but luckily we now have plenty of internal tools to quickly see the range of sales of an artist in many markets/formats.

New additions today, from smallest to biggest:

Posted by: @landischorsch

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I would love to read sales articles about Lionel Richie/Commodores (I assume both beyond 100M EAS aggregated), Chicago (more than 100M EAS? Dunno!), Cliff Richard (I have absolutely no idea how much he's sold so far), Al Jarreau, Dave Grusin and Brand X (all three rather niche artists, but I adore them personally).

@mjd thank you. I just discovered it that you added some artists. Very interesting.

I'm from Europe and when I grew up Cliff Richard was kind of everywhere, especially on radio. He had been active in the business since 1958 and still hitting the single charts up to the 1990s. So, in my imagination he was a mega star for decades. Reading he's "only" sold slightly more than 50M EAS is really surprising to me. Indeed, I thought he was around 100M EAS. But within the years, I realized he was only a star in Europe, mostly in his native UK. In America he's had only a few hit singles.

I also expected Chicago more than 100M EAS, because they were huge during the 1970s, especially in their homeland US, and also partly during the 1980s, with their most selling album Chicago 17 (1984).

Also, Herbert Grönemeyer at 21M EAS is really interesting. Coming from Germany, there's no way to not have heard of Grönemeyer. Outside of German speaking countries, he's totally unknown while here, he's a national treasure whether you like him or not. To be honest I expected him to have sold around 30M EAS here.

@mjd so is "Tapestry" at 30-35m EAS?

It's the biggest female album before MTV days by far

Another thing. I've read that German bandleader James Last has sold more than 80M EAS worldwide. I strongly guess his biggest share of success was in his home country. I have no idea how big the share is, but I guess it's more than 50 percent of his success.

If so, then with maybe approximately 40M EAS (or more) Last is by far the most-selling artist in Germany... more than Genesis + Phil Collins summed up, The Beatles + Paul McCartney summed up, Herbert Grönemeyer or Michael Jackson have sold here!

I confirm, Last is far and away the biggest seller ever in Germany, 39.5m album sales there for him, add that a few singles, downloads, streams, and there are likely some more sales unaccounted for if he has box sets (I did not saw notable ones but even minor sellers can add for healthy amounts when they have many discs).  Also true about Cliff Richard, nearly 50% of his CSPC total is from the UK. For him too boxes and the likes can increase sales a bit, but clearly he is no contender at 100m level nor 75m. 

As for Carole King, she still sold like 14m-ish units of her remaining studio albums, their singles did 5m, and 20% or so of her streams and compilations, leaving 25-26 million for Tapestry.

Today's additions:

AKB48
ARASHI
Steve Miller Band
Kenny G
Kenny Rogers

The latter is the biggest of the novelties so far 🙂

John Denver

Lionel Richie

Daryl Hall & John Oates

Donna Summer 

Stevie Nicks

Limp Bizkit 

Earth, Wind & Fire

Nelly 

The Smiths

The Clash  

Michael Bolton

Dolly Parton

Heart 

Blink-182

Pet Shop Boys 

Nelly Furtado

Barry Manilow

Sheryl Crow

Talking Heads

Paula Abdul 

Eurythmics

Susan Boyle

Some older acts to add:

Johnny Cash

Miles Davis

Little Richard

James Brown

Nat King Cole

Bing Crosby

Louis Armstrong

The Kingston Trio

Johnny Mathis

Harry Belafonte

Nina Simone

Peter, Paul and Mary 

Brenda Lee

Andy Williams 

Ella Fitzgerald

Chuck Berry 

Glenn Miller  

The Who 

The Kinks 

The Animals

The Monkees

The Temptations 

Does anyone of this list make the top 50 of all time?