CSPC: High School Musical Popularity Analysis

Digital Singles Sales

As a reminder, the weighting is done with a 10 to 1,5 ratio between albums and digital singles.

High School Musical (2006) – 975,000 equivalent albums

Start of Something New – 1,000,000
Get’cha Head In the Game – 700,000
What I’ve Been Looking For – 600,000
Breaking Free – 1,600,000
We’re All in This Together – 800,000
Remaining tracks – 1,800,000

High School Musical 2 (2007) – 758,000 equivalent albums

What Time Is It? – 600,000
You Are the Music in Me – 650,000
I Don’t Dance – 400,000
Gotta Go My Own Way – 850,000
Bet on It – 550,000
Everyday – 600,000
Remaining tracks – 1,400,000

High School Musical 3: Senior Year (2008) – 420,000 equivalent albums

Now or Never – 350,000
Right Here, Right Now – 300,000
I Want It All – 200,000
A Night to Remember – 250,000
Can I Have This Dance? – 600,000
Remaining tracks – 1,100,000

Teen acts are among the best examples to illustrate that digital sales of singles truly replaced album sales in terms of consumption. As previously mentioned, the High School Musical LPs had no successful hit. No airplay means no digital sales. Most members of the general public never heard these tunes.

Still, this page shows they sold a total of 14 million downloads. How come? If one checks carefully, they will notice the same phenomenon that happened with Justin Bieber, One Direction and Hannah Montana, e.g. consistent sales over the entire track lists, rather than a couple of hits selling a lot. This is due to kids liking High School Musical but at times with no money to buy the albums. Instead, they had access to iTunes with gift cards to consume. Our Commensurate Sales to Popularity Concept relocate accurately this behavior by translating downloads of singles into equivalent album sales, more than 2 million in the case of this franchise.