CSPC: Foo Fighters 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 – Compilations / Live sets / EPs

How to understand this table? If you check for example the Greatest Hits compilation line, those figures mean it sold 3,900,000 units worldwide. The second statistics column means all versions of all the songs included on this package add for 1,109,000 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 The Colour and the Shape album are responsible for 34% of the Greatest Hits track list attractiveness. This means it generated 1,339,000 of its 3,900,000 album sales and so forth for the other records.

This share of The Colour and the Shape is the key element here. This album generated plenty of sales across different sets, from the studio album to the digital single but also compilations and live packages. It contributes for more than half of Skin and Bones‘ sales. Every other album up to Echoes, Silence, and Patience & Grace have its own share of appeal also.