CSPC: David Bowie Popularity Analysis

Rebel Rebel

Exactly one year ago on January 10 2016, the music World lost one of the most talented and influential artist of all-time, David Bowie. The legendary singer of Heroes has been active from his young years until his very last days, dropping Blackstar, stylized , a mere two days before his passing.

From his very first single way back in 1964 to this last LP, the singer built an impressive catalog of 27 albums and countless of cult songs. His ever-changing style at times left out some of his public, at times attracted a complete new one, the fact that remained consistent is the artist dedication to be as innovative as possible. While following trends is the easiest way to be successful, creating them isn’t always efficient in a commercial point of view. After over half a century of active career plus one year of tribute moments, the overall success of the artist is difficult to define. Anyone would be able to tell Elvis Presley or Michael Jackson have been huge and that Leonard Cohen or Roy Orbison surely haven’t sold that much, but David Bowie status in a commercial point of view is unclear. Thanks to the Commensurate Sales to Popularity Concept, we will be able to set a viable conclusion.

As a reminder for users who are not yet familiar with the CSPC idea you do not need to worry, it is quite simple as it only consists in 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 how much each David Bowie album sold. Then, we will check sales of each track from those albums on 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 all compilations, live albums and music videos they dropped. Once all the raw data is set, we will only need to apply appropriate weighting to get the overall picture of the legendary Ziggy Stardust author career results.

Let’s go!

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El Jolito

The Greatest solo artist in history.

Tony

That will be Michael Jackson

Mikko

Best selling solo artist of all time, but not most important or most influential solo artist of all time.

Tony

That’s just your opinion, mine is he is very overrated and his sales are poor considering he is supposed to be that good. Half a dozen very good songs doesn’t make you the greatest.

Martin

Yes, Jacksons sales and popularity are amazing and his influence immense but Bowie was way, way more diverse than Jackson.

Nick

It’s so irritating when people can’t wrap their heads around the fact that sales aren’t everything. Sales are great but they don’t indicate how inventive, creative, influential, etc. an artist was/is.

Jazz

Who cares. Musical diversity and critical acclaim is so overrated.

Martin

Lots of people care, lots of people don’t want to listen to an artist who just releases the same sounding stuff over and over again.

As for critical acclaim, I couldn’t give a toss about it either.

Last edited 5 months ago by Martin
Analord

“That’s just your opinion”

It’s all about opinions, except if you believe that talent should be measured by success, which would be very dumb.

Speed of Life

Also the version of All The Young Dudes with Ian Hunter and Bowie on vocals on the Mott The Hoople page doesn’t show up on his features.

Speed of Life

Just noticed that a number of Bowie songs have recently been been greyed out on spotify and their totals no longer show on the spotify tool report.They’re all on the albums Platinum Collection and Sound + Vision.
Also for some reason the songs credited to Bowie and the Spider on the Bowie at the Beeb album have a separate artist id??