CSPC: Dirty Dancing 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.

How to understand this table? If you check for example the Total Dirty Dancing line, those figures mean it sold 250,000 units worldwide. The second statistics column means all versions of all the songs included on this package add for 434,000 equivalent album sales from streams of all types in the case of the original Dirty Dancing soundtrack included inside this box set.

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. In this case, streaming figures tell us songs from the Dirty Dancing album released in 1987 are obviously responsible for  100% of this disc contained in the Total Dirty Dancing box set track list attractiveness. This means it generated all of the 250,000 sales generated by this box set.

Above everything we notice how the whole Dirty Dancing franchise benefited mostly from multiple box sets containing its multiple individual albums which are naturally added to each one separately, as has been the case in previous analyses.

In particular, three box sets have focused on both Dirty Dancing and More Dirty Dancing repackaged together: these were the cases of Total Dirty Dancing in 1990, Ultimate Dirty Dancing in 2003 and finally the Dirty Dancing 20th Anniversary in 2007, with sales of 250,000, 1,760,000 and 300,000 respectively, that is a comprehensive total of 2,310,000 copies added to both albums.