CSPC: Elton John Popularity Analysis
https://flic.kr/p/air7To
Full Length related record Sales – Part 1
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.
Part 1 – Global compilations #1
How to understand this table? If you check for example the Greatest Hits line, those figures mean it sold 22,410,000 units worldwide. The second statistics column means all versions of all the songs included on this package add for 602,000 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 the Goodbye Yellow Brick Road album are responsible for 30% of the Greatest Hits track list attractiveness. This means it generated 6,686,000 of its 22,410,000 album sales and so forth for the other records.
This first list of compilations includes the 3 successive Greatest Hits albums, each of which covered different songs. We can point out that songs from Goodbye Yellow Brick Road were the main strength of Greatest Hits but they also had a great impact on Greatest Hits II. An interesting observation is also that Greatest Hits III was almost exclusively powered by songs from Too Low For Zero.
Love Songs is the first career-spanning global compilation of the artist, although it focused on love songs only as suggested by its title. The album Elton John is its main provider since this package includes Your Song but not the likes of Tiny Dancer and Rocket Man.