CSPC: Amy Winehouse Popularity Analysis

It is hard to believe its been five years since Amy Winehouse passed away. The definitive shooting star. The personality of the Jazz singer was so unique that she printed an indelible mark in the history of music culture.

Her discography as of today is made up of three albums from a purely technical point of view. In reality, her debut album Frank went mostly unnoticed when first released in 2003, except in the UK where it sold a few copies. Her last album Lioness: Hidden Treasures is a posthumous cash-in including some new,  albeit unfinished, songs. Thus, it is really all about Back To Black, a cult 2006 album that broke the main audience the following year and never really left airwaves and charts since.

The difficulty with such an iconic artist is to distinguish the popularity of the artist and the popularity of the personality. An iconic act doesn’t necessarily mean huge seller. The Velvet Underground can tell you a bit about that. Our aim today is to establish the popularity Amy thanks to the CSPC method.

As a reminder we’ll be using the usual method, merging every format sales an artist has been getting and attributing them to respective studio albums. We will start by focusing on raw data, setting out how much each album sold. Then, we will check sales of each track from those albums in each format – physical, digital and streaming – and weight them to value those figures on a par with album sales. To complete the study, we will study sales of the compilations, live albums and music videos they released. Once all the raw data is set we will only need to apply appropriate weighting to get the overall picture of Amy Winehouse‘s career results.

Let’s go!

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