Alanis Morissette albums and songs sales

Back in mid-1995, Canadian singer-songwriter Alanis Morissette was unknown outside of her native country. A couple of years later, her global debut had outsold career peaks of Madonna, Mariah Carey and Janet Jackson. As a definitive evidence of that success, this album, Jagged Little Pill, has now been adapted into a musical.

The career of Morissette hasn’t always been an evergreen story though. After debuting in 1991 in Canada, she crossed over the main audience 4 years later. Suddenly, she was all over the place. Songs You Oughta Know, Hand in My Pocket, Ironic, You Learn, Head over Feet and All I Really Want made the LP the anthem of the decade. Apart from her 1995 blockbuster yet, her catalog seems fairly unknown. Has she gone through the 90s as a comet or is she simply not too visible on media because of her anti-star persona?

ChartMasters’ method: the CSPC

As usual, I’ll be using the Commensurate Sales to Popularity Concept (CSPC) in order to relevantly gauge the act’s results. It will not only bring you sales information for all albums, physical and download singles, as well as audio and video streaming. In fact, it will really determine the act’s popularity.

If you are not yet familiar with the CSPC method, below is a nice and short video of explaining the concept. I recommend watching it before reading on and to the sales figures. You’ll get the idea in just two minutes.

And if you want to know the full method as well as formulas, you can read the full introduction article.

Now let’s get into the artist’s detailed sales figures!

Original Albums Sales

Alanis (1991)

• Canada – 175,000

Not released elsewhere.

Now Is the Time (1992)

• Canada – 60,000

Not released elsewhere.

Jagged Little Pill (1995)

Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie (1998)

Under Rug Swept (2002)

So-Called Chaos (2004)

Flavors of Entanglement (2008)

Havoc and Bright Lights (2012)

Original Album Sales – Comments

1991 Alanis – 175,000
1992 Now Is the Time – 60,000
1995 Jagged Little Pill – 33,570,000
1998 Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie – 7,430,000
2002 Under Rug Swept – 3,230,000
2004 So-Called Chaos – 1,540,000
2008 Flavors of Entanglement – 650,000
2012 Havoc and Bright Lights – 420,000

Over 47 million across 8 albums, more than 33,5 million of which come from Jagged Little Pill. The domination of this album over Alanis Morissette‘s discography is insane. It’s difficult to identify a positive indicator about the remaining albums. They all registered taught drops in comparison to their predecessors. Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie is a good seller in absolute terms, but relatively speaking it completely killed the momentum of the diva.

Still, we can’t overlook a 33 million seller. Jagged Little Pill is absolutely gigantic. It is on a virtual tie with Michael Jackson‘s Bad and Shania Twain‘s Come On Over among the best selling studio albums ever. Among female albums, it is topped only by Whitney Houston‘s Bodyguard.

Physical Singles Sales

Singles from Jagged Little Pill were incredibly successful in supporting the album. Nevertheless, they weren’t as huge in physical single format. Ironic still sold well past a million thanks to 650,000 US sales and over half a million in Europe. You Oughta Know, paired with You Learn in the US, was the only other CD single released in that market. The remaining singles relied almost exclusively on sales from Europe and Australia.

Ironically, while they had limited lasting appeal, singles Thank U and Hands Clean sold decently upon release. As a general note, physical singles remain a low format for Morissette who sold 3,3 million copies through this avenue.

As a reminder, the weighting is done with a 10 to 3 ratio between one album and one physical single.

Alanis (1991) – 1,000 equivalent albums

All singles – 3,000

Now Is the Time (1992) – 0 equivalent album

All singles – 1,000

Jagged Little Pill (1995) – 690,000 equivalent albums

You Oughta Know – 600,000
Hand in My Pocket – 120,000
Ironic – 1,270,000
You Learn – 90,000
Head over Feet – 190,000
All I Really Want – 30,000

Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie (1998) – 162,000 equivalent albums

Thank U – 410,000
That I Would Be Good – 5,000
Unsent – 5,000
So Pure – 20,000
Joining You – 100,000

Under Rug Swept (2002) – 54,000 equivalent albums

Hands Clean – 160,000
Precious Illusions – 20,000

So-Called Chaos (2004) – 80,000 equivalent albums

Eight Easy Steps – 5,000
Out Is Through – 10,000
Everything – 250,000

Flavors of Entanglement (2008) – 3,000 equivalent albums

Underneath – 10,000

Havoc and Bright Lights (2012) – 3,000 equivalent albums

Guardian – 10,000

Orphan – 9,000 equivalent albums

Crazy – 30,000

Digital Singles Sales

It’s never a good sign when 73% of your downloads and ringtones come from an album which preceded the digital era by nearly one decade. It shows how much Morissette‘s recent efforts failed to produce hits.

In the other side, it also demonstrates the strong enduring appeal of Jagged Little Pill‘s songs. Ironic is comfortably over 2 million so far while both You Oughta Know and Hand In My Pocket are million sellers. You Learn and Head over Feet both top half a million units too. In total, tracks from the album moved 6,64 million digital sales, 5 million of which come from the US and Canada.

As a reminder, the weighting is done with a 10 to 1,5 ratio between one album and one digital single.

Alanis (1991) – 0 equivalent album

Unavailable through downloads platforms.

Now Is the Time (1992) – 0 equivalent album

Unavailable through downloads platforms.

Jagged Little Pill (1995) – 996,000 equivalent albums

All I Really Want – 210,000
You Oughta Know – 1,410,000
Hand in My Pocket – 1,120,000
You Learn – 540,000
Head over Feet – 660,000
Ironic – 2,220,000
Remaining tracks – 480,000

Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie (1998) – 93,000 equivalent albums

Thank U – 440,000
Remaining tracks – 180,000

Under Rug Swept (2002) – 39,000 equivalent albums

Hands Clean – 150,000
Remaining tracks – 110,000

So-Called Chaos (2004) – 38,000 equivalent albums

All tracks – 250,000

Flavors of Entanglement (2008) – 65,000 equivalent albums

Underneath – 220,000
Not as We – 130,000
Remaining tracks – 80,000

Havoc and Bright Lights (2012) – 47,000 equivalent albums

Guardian – 250,000
Remaining tracks – 60,000

Orphan – 84,000 equivalent albums

Uninvited – 200,000
Crazy – 160,000
Remaining tracks – 200,000

Streaming Sales

Streaming is made up of audio and video streams. Our CSPC methodology now includes both to better reflect the real popularity of each track. The main source of data for each avenue is respectively Spotify and YouTube. As detailed in the Fixing Log article, Spotify represents 157 million of the 272 million users of streaming platforms, while YouTube is pretty much the only video platform generating some revenue for the industry. Below is the equivalence set on the aforementioned article:

Audio Stream – 1500 plays equal 1 album unit
Video Stream – 11,750 views equal 1 album unit

Equivalent Albums Sales (EAS) = 272/157 * Spotify streams / 1500 + YouTube views / 11750

Streaming Part 1

These two albums issued in early 90s have been pretty much deleted from Earth since then. They weren’t produced nor shipped as catalog items, they weren’t on iTunes and they aren’t on Spotify. Their tracks can be found on YouTube still, where they have very modest showings.

Streaming Part 2

Jagged Little Pill remains an all-around force. While it doesn’t contain a monster streaming favorite like Oasis‘ Wonderwall or Red Hot Chili Peppers‘ Under the Bridge, all its songs do well. Close to 400,000 EAS in total, more than a third of these results come from Ironic. The classic song tops 100 million on both Spotify and YouTube. You Oughta Know, Hand In My Pocket, You Learn and Head over Feat are all very solid with at least 33,000 EAS a piece. Interestingly, album cuts are streamed frequently too as all of them top 3 million plays on Spotify.

The story is completely different with Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie. The single Thank U is the only one which survived through the years. It is responsible for 36,000 EAS out of the album total of 55,000 EAS.

Streaming Part 3

Two real bombs, there isn’t much to save out of Under Rug Swept and So-Called Chaos. These eras are irrelevant quantities on Morissette‘s catalog nowadays. The only song from this period which tops 10,000 EAS is Hands Clean.

Streaming Part 4

Both Flavors of Entanglement and Havoc and Bright Ligths increased more and more the distance between Alanis Morissette and the general public’s eyes and ears. Streams of the latter are especially dreadful for an album released in 2012 when Spotify was already taking off. There is only one minor positive note out of them, that’s Guardian which managed somehow to be a moderate hit in GSA area.

Streaming Part 5

Two songs slightly emerge from the list of orphan tunes. The first one is Uninvited, a song recorded as part of the City of Angels Soundtrack. That LP sold close to 6 million units in the US alone. While Uninvited definitely helped, the sountrack’s main hit was Iris by the Goo Goo Dolls. The second relevant orphan song is Crazy, used as the lead single for 2005 compilation The Collection. Now that we mention compilations, let’s move to them…

Full Length related record Sales

It sounds fairly logical to add together weighted sales of one era – studio album, physical singles, downloads, streams – to get the full picture of an album’s popularity. For older releases though, they also generate sales of various live, music videos and compilation albums.

All those packaging-only records do not create value, they exploit the value originating from the parent studio album of each of its tracks instead. Inevitably, when such compilations are issued, this downgrades catalog sales of the original LP. Thus, to perfectly gauge the worth of these releases, we need to re-assign sales proportionally to its contribution of all the compilations which feature its songs. The following table explains this method.

How to understand this table? If you check this example, these figures mean The Collection sold 1,710,000 units worldwide. Then, the second statistics column means streams of all the songs included on this package add for 454,952 EAS.

The second part at the right of the table shows how many streams are coming from each original album as well as the share they represent. Thus, streaming figures tell us Jagged Little Pill songs are responsible for 77% of the The Collection tracklist attractiveness. In other words, it generated 1,316,000 of its 1,710,000 album sales. Eventually, we apply this methodology to all compilations.

Since Jagged Little Pill is so overwhelming over the singer’s catalog, it is no surprise to see that its tracks fueled the major part of The Collection sales. We will list all her compilation-like records to see how sales are distributed into her studio albums.

Compilations

Jagged Little Pill is obviously a blockbuster by itself. It also powered 3 additional million selling albums. The first is 1999’s live effort MTV Unplugged which sold 3,3 million units. Songs from the 1995 beast represent 88% of its attractiveness. Then 2005 releases The Collection and Jagged Little Pill Acoustic sold 2,7 million combined, once again towed by the same songs.

Full Length related records Sales – Summary

Here is the most underestimated indicator of an album’s success – the amount of compilation sales of all kinds it generated. Due to the dependency of sales of the original studio albums on these releases, they are a key piece of the jigsaw. Once again, Jagged Little Pill is on a category of its own.

BONUS: Total Album (all types) Sales per Country

• America
  • US – 24,805,000
  • Canada – 3,740,000
  • Argentina – 250,000
  • Brazil – 1,465,000
  • Mexico – 780,000
• Asia – 2,795,000
  • Japan – 1,310,000
• Oceania
  • Australia – 1,455,000
  • New Zealand – 275,000
• Europe – 16,980,000
  • UK – 4,645,000
  • France – 1,670,000
  • Germany – 3,010,000
  • Italy – 1,630,000
  • Spain – 745,000
  • Sweden – 390,000
  • Netherlands – 920,000
  • Switzerland – 445,000
  • Austria – 350,000
  • Finland – 125,000
• World – 53,380,000

Please note that some of the countries totals may be slightly incomplete when the figure is N/A for minor releases. Countries with too much missing information to be precise enough are listed as N/A.

ALANIS MORISSETTE CAREER CSPC RESULTS

So, after checking all the figures, how many overall equivalent album sales has each album by Alanis Morissette achieved? Well, at this point we hardly need to add up all of the figures defined in this article!

In the following results table, all categories display figures in equivalent album sales. If different, pure sales are listed between parentheses.

'Av.' stands for Average, 'LD' for Last Day.

As a reminder:

• Studio Album: sales of the original album
• Other Releases: sales of compilations generated thanks to the album
• Physical Singles: sales of physical singles from the album (ratio 3/10)
• Download Singles: sales of digital singles from the album (ratio 1,5/10)
• Streaming: equivalent album sales of all the album tracks (ratio 1/1500 for Audio stream and 1/6750 for Video stream)

Artist career totals

See where the artist ranks among remaining singers

Conclusions

Morissette is one of these artists who released accidentally an album bigger than her. The discreet diva is unlikely to dislike this fact since she never went after success. Jagged Little Pill was just too big to remain unnoticed. As of now, it stands at a whopping 41,5 million EAS. That makes it the 6th most successful female album of all-time.

Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie is much lower at 8 million across all formats and releases. That represents a monster fall of 80,6% in comparison to its predecessor, enough to put it among the biggest flops we studied up to now at Chartmasters. While it is always difficult to call a flop an album that sold so much, we need to take into consideration investments and expectations. Given the success of Jagged, Supposed was highly promoted upon release. A lot of people were expecting her new album. As a matter of fact, the album went quickly 3xPlatinum in the US, a mark it never reached in retail sales.

Collapses continued for Morissette. Under Rug Swept stopped its way at 3,6 million while So-Called Chaos failed to go higher than 1,7 million. The next two albums missed the million and the half a million mark, respectively. She has the sad record of 4 consecutive eras with less than 50% sales of their immediate predecessor. Her next release will face the risk of selling less than 1% of her peak record.

After 8 albums, the singer is closing in 57 million EAS. She will struggle to climb much higher in the future unless a major turnaround happens.

To go deeper…

Thanks to our new ASR (Artist Success Rating) concept, we know that their sales represent 32.6 million times the purchase of their full catalog. Coupled with her total sales, it translates into an ASR score of 244. She is just higher than Enya.

Additionally, the following sections list her most successful songs as well as her records and achievements.

As usual, feel free to comment and / or ask a question!

Sources: IFPI, Spotify, YouTube, Discogs, Chartmasters.org.

ALANIS MORISSETTE’S BIGGEST TRACKS

The list is compiled in album equivalent sales generated by each song. Therefore, these figures are not merged units of singles formats. Instead, it includes weighted sales of the song’s physical single, download, ringtone and streaming as well as its share among sales of all albums on which it is featured.

1. 1995 – Alanis Morissette – Ironic [Jagged Little Pill] – 16,060,000
2. 1995 – Alanis Morissette – You Oughta Know [Jagged Little Pill] – 7,910,000
3. 1998 – Alanis Morissette – Thank U [Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie] – 5,300,000
4. 1995 – Alanis Morissette – Hand in My Pocket [Jagged Little Pill] – 5,140,000
5. 1995 – Alanis Morissette – You Learn [Jagged Little Pill] – 4,280,000
6. 1995 – Alanis Morissette – Head over Feet [Jagged Little Pill] – 3,590,000
7. 2002 – Alanis Morissette – Hands Clean [Under Rug Swept] – 2,260,000
8. 1998 – Alanis Morissette – That I Would Be Good [Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie] – 1,220,000
9. 1995 – Alanis Morissette – All I Really Want [Jagged Little Pill] – 1,110,000
10. 2004 – Alanis Morissette – Everything [So-Called Chaos] – 950,000

RECORDS & ACHIEVEMENTS

• At 41,484,000 EAS, Jagged Little Pill is the most successful album from 1995.
• At 41,484,000 EAS, Jagged Little Pill is the 6th most successful female album of all-time.
• At 33,570,000 pure sales, Jagged Little Pill is the 10th highest selling studio album of all-time.
• At 16,060,000 EAS, Ironic is the most successful song from 1995.

NB: EAS means Equivalent Album Sales.

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