Gorillaz albums and songs sales

We are all Humanz, but some are more successful than others. After dropping four #1 albums in a row in the UK during the 90s with Blur, singer Damon Albarn started his new project in late 90s with the virtual band Gorillaz.

Two iconic songs shot them to global success. A success they are now trying to maintain with their 8th studio album, Cracker Island.

A few words about the artist

Born in 1968, British-born musician Damon Albarn founded Blur in 1988. Their debut single She’s So High came out a pair of years later, reaching UK’s Top 50 singles chart.

Their 3rd and 4th albums, Parklife and The Great Escape, are some of the most critically acclaiming albums from the Britpop era.

They also kicked a wonderful commercial period for the band. In fact, Blur stand on 6 consecutive #1 albums in their homeland, up to 2015’s The Magic Whip.

In-between, he decided to create Gorillaz with his friend, comic book creator Jamie Hewlett, who handles the visual part, while Albarn is responsible for the musical input.

2001 single Clint Eastwood instantly smashed, pushing its parent eponymous album, to the higher region of charts everywhere in the world. Thanks to this single, Gorillaz quickly got more global than Blur have ever been, also breaking the US market.

Sophomore effort Demon Days, supported by another big hit with Feel Good Inc., confirmed their success.

From 2010 onwards, it felt like the band was struggling to retain their popularity, but many years later they are still follow their way and hitting #1 spots with their new albums. Now 55, Albarn got a way to remain forever young.

The Commensurate Sales to Popularity Concept (CSPC)

As usual, I’ll be using the Commensurate Sales to Popularity Concept in order to relevantly gauge his results. This concept will not only bring you sales information for all West‘s albums, physical and download singles, as well as audio and video streaming. In fact, it will also determine their true popularity.

If you are not yet familiar with the CSPC method, below is a nice and short video of explanations. I fully recommend watching it before getting into the sales figures. Of course, if you are a regular visitor feel free to skip the video and get into the numbers directly.

There are two ways to understand this revolutionary concept. In the first place, there is this Scribe video posted below. If you are unaware of the CSPC method, you will get the full idea within just a pair of minutes.

If you are a mathematical person, and want to know the full method as well as formulas, you can read the full introduction article.

Now let’s get into the artist’s sales figures in detail in order to apply this concept and define the act’s true popularity!

Gorillaz Album Sales

Updated Studio Album Sales & Comments

Before further comments on their sales results, it must be said that the record The Fall was first released for free via downloads in late 2010. This explains its very low sales figures considering the market at this point.

Both Gorillaz and Demons Days did very well, selling a combined 14 million units. While doing OK in the UK was a given considering the status of Damon Albarn there, it was far from being an easy task elsewhere.

In the US, Blur’s biggest albums Parklife and The Great Escape both failed to make the Top 100. Thus, Gorillaz selling in excess of 2 million there with both their first two albums was extraordinary.

Unfortunately, the golden days were over by 2010 when Plastic Beach failed to do as well. While it struggled to hit a million, catalog sales have been amazing relatively speaking. It is now closing on 2 million units.

The same can be said at a lower scale for The Fall. While pure sales are now much lower, they continue to shift at least 200,000 units per release.

Gorillaz songs sales

Below, we list down results from the artist through physical sales, digital sales and streaming.

Please be aware that when the artist is regarded as the lead act, he is rewarded with 100% of these units, while featured acts share among them a 50% piece of the totals.

Physical Singles

As a reminder, the weighting is done with a 10 to 3 ratio between one album and one physical single.

In physical format, Clint Eastwood has no competition among the Gorillaz’s catalog. Selling over 1 million units, mostly in Europe, the song is a nice addition in terms of equivalent album sales to the self-titled effort.

Both Feel Good Inc. and DARE did just as well, if not better, in the singles chart. However, the market had changed by then with download sales starting to replace the dwindling physicals market. That said, they still sold a combined 610,000 units.

Digital Songs

As a reminder, the weighting is done with a 10 to 1.5 ratio between one album and one digital single.

Gorillaz kind of missed the best years of the downloads era with both Gorillaz and Demon Days released before the explosion of this market, especially as they haven’t got a proper hit after the downloads explosion occurred.

This being said, Clint Eastwood and Feel Good Inc. are tremendous catalog sellers, shifting past 3 and 6 million units respectively in this format. The latter was one of the first songs ever to move past 1 million in the US.

DARE is a solid seller as well, now on 2 million. In total, the band sold 19 million download singles.

Streaming

Streaming is made up of audio and video streams. Our CSPC methodology includes both to better reflect the real popularity of each track.

The main source of data for each avenue is respectively Spotify and YouTube. To factor in the growing impact of multiple Asian countries where these platforms aren’t always the go-to site for music streaming, more sources have been added.

In order to account for their real popularity in each relevant country, the below sources have been used along with the mentioned ratios that reflect the market share of each area.

Audio Streams
– South Korea: Genie streams * 2.20 (consistent with Gaon streaming numbers)
– Japan: AWA streams * 100 / 4 (AWA has 4% of the Japanese streaming market)
– Arabic world: Anghami streams
– Sub-Saharan Africa: Boomplay + Audiomack streams
– Elsewhere: Spotify streams * Spotify market shares based on artists’ market distribution

Video Streams
– China* : QQ video streams * 50 if the song is available for audio stream, QQ video streams * 5 elseway (scale built based on known figures for several major artists)
– Elsewhere : Youtube views increased by 10% to account for various local platforms

*since Chinese streaming platforms are mostly video streaming platforms, their streams are weighted on par with YouTube streams.

Audio Stream value – 1,500 plays equal 1 album unit
Video Stream value – 6,750 views equal 1 album unit

Equivalent Albums Sales (EAS) = ( Spotify * ArtistRatio + Genie * 2.20 + AWA * 100 / 4 + Anghami + Boomplay + Audiomack ) / 1500 + ( QQ views* 50(or 5) + YouTube * 1.1 ) / 6750

Top Hits

Feel Good Inc. is getting bigger and bigger, now over a billion streams both sides on Spotify and YouTube. Impressively, it tops every platform, from each market.

It is all the more impressive considering that Clint Eastwood was big enough to be expected to remain their signature song when it first came in. Now over 2 decades old, recurrent streams of the song are still very strong, around 700 million on both main platforms.

Behind the expected top 2, Plastic Beach interestingly places two songs in the band’s top 5, On Melancholy Hill and Rhinestone Eyes.

Regarded as some kind of a flop when first released, the album registers over 1 million equivalent album sales from these two tracks alone. Stylo and Empire Ants also crack 100 million streams on Spotify.

Tracks ranked at 8-9-10 are all from 2017’s Humanz, which is also a solid result.

Songs from the newly released Cracker Island haven’t got time to build large numbers, it is home to 3 songs inside their top 25 still. While numbers aren’t huge in absolute terms, they show that the catalog of the band is more balanced than it used to be, with relevant streams from almost all albums.

Speaking about albums, Demon Days remains their strongest one with 3 million sales from streams alone.

Full catalog breakdown

If you are familiar with the artist’s catalog and want to check details of each and every song, you can access to all of them right here.

Keep yourself up to date

Our website provides you a fantastic tool which fetches updated Spotify streams as you request them, use it to watch these results grow day after day!

Gorillaz compilations 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.

The distribution process

How to understand this table? In the example of The Singles Collection 2001-2011, these figures mean it sold 475,000 units worldwide. The second statistics column means all versions of all the songs included on this package add for 5,671,595 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 Demon Days album are responsible for 43% of The Singles Collection 2001-2011 track list attractiveness. This means it generated 206,000 of its 475,000 album sales and so forth for the other records. We then apply this process to all compilations present on the table.

Compilations sales figures listing

Full Length related records Sales – Summary

Here is the most underestimated indicator of an album’s success – the amount of compilation sales of all kinds it generated. Due to the dependency of sales of the original studio albums on these releases, they are a key piece of the jigsaw. 

These numbers are obtained by applying the method from the section The distribution process to all packages listed under Compilation sales figures listing category.

Total Album (all types) Sales per Country

Please note country-specific numbers may miss sales of a few minor releases, although totals are complete.

Gorillaz Career CSPC Results

So, after checking all the figures, how many overall equivalent album sales has each album by Gorillaz achieved? Well, at this point we hardly need to add up all of the figures defined in this article!

Albums CSPC results

In the following results table, all categories display figures in equivalent album sales. If different, pure sales are listed between parentheses.

'Av.' stands for Average, 'LD' for Last Day.

As a reminder:

• Studio Album: sales of the original album
• Other Releases: sales of compilations generated thanks to the album
• Physical Singles: sales of physical singles from the album (ratio 3/10)
• Download Singles: sales of digital singles from the album (ratio 1,5/10)
• Streaming: equivalent album sales of all the album tracks (ratio 1/1500 for Audio stream and 1/6750 for Video stream)

Artist career totals

See where the artist ranks among remaining singers

Leading 3 sales avenues out of 5, Demon Days tops the list among the Gorillaz’s albums. Its 13 million plus sales comfortably put it among the biggest albums from 2005. It’s also a great catalog seller and a better performer streaming-wise than most albums from this period, so it’s poised to climb up the ladder.

Also past the 10 million milestone is the eponymous debut. No need to say that it also belongs to the most successful albums from its release year, 2001.

Claiming 4 million units, Plastic Beach is no more the major disappointment that it was back in 2010. Humanz also registers a very respectable total of 2 million.

The rest of the discography is below 1 million, but as their streaming statistics are quite good all but The Fall have a shot at getting there sooner or latter.

In total, Gorillaz are up to 33 million equivalent album sales. 

Singles CSPC results

The list is compiled in album equivalent sales generated by each song. Therefore, these figures are not merged units of singles formats. Instead, it includes weighted sales of the song’s physical single, download, ringtone and streaming as well as its share among sales of all albums on which it is featured.

Discography results

Thanks to our new ASR (Artist Success Rating) concept, we know that sales represent 18.30 million times the purchase of entire discography. Coupled with total sales, it translates into an ASR score of 132.

The ranking of all artists studied so far is available too at this link.

Records & Achievements

• At 10,273,000 EAS, Gorillaz is among the 20 most successful albums from 2001.
• At 13,018,000 EAS, Demon Days is among the 10 most successful albums from 2005.

NB: EAS means Equivalent Album Sales.

Dynamic Spotify Key Performance Indicators

Please note that numbers below are retrieved automatically, so they will evolve day by day unlike previously listed data which is valid as of the publication date of the article.

As usual, feel free to comment and / or ask a question!

Sources: IFPI, Spotify, YouTube, Discogs.

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