CSPC: Cher Popularity Analysis

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.

Remaining Long Format – Part 1 – Compilations

How to understand this table? If you check for example the Greatest Hits of Cher compilation line (the last one) those figures mean it sold 700,000 units worldwide. The second statistics column means all versions of all the songs included on this package add for 14,000 equivalent album sales from streams of all types.

The second part on the right of the table shows how many equivalent streams are coming from each original album, plus the share it represents on the overall package. Thus, streaming figures tell us songs from Dark Lady are responsible for 26% of the Greatest Hits track list attractiveness. This means it generated 182,000 of its 700,000 album sales and so forth for the other records.

Released at random moments and quickly replaced, those compilations haven’t amassed many sales individually. Their overall total is decent though. The main provider of sales of Sonny & Cher compilations is clearly Look At Us, which is logical since its I Got You Babe is the only song remembered by the duet.

Early compilations of Cher have their sales spread more equally among her 1965-1974 studio albums.