CSPC: Mariah Carey Popularity Analysis

Mariah Carey Picture

Its arrived. The one many of you wanted to be studied. For various months many of you have been requesting to add Mariah Carey among the studied acts. After completing career-listings of Madonna, Celine Dion and Whitney Houston this demand increased even more. From the mid-80s to early 00s these four singers sold so many records that talks about those iconic divas started to gain ground and haven’t stopped since.

So who sold the most? In reality, wondering which one did the best out of those four females is kind of a rich person’s problem. In fact, the first thing that needs to be said is that they all did insanely well. They all broke various records here and there and they all have no competition at all in their respective leagues – well, sorry Barbra Streisand, I haven’t forgotten about you but your career is too different to fairly include you inside this Madonna – generation legends battle.

Among Mariah Carey’s achievements feature her 18 US #1 hits, a tally putting her on par with Elvis Presley and runner up to the Beatles. She did so in a relatively smooth period for singles sales and the Hot 100 heavily factored Airplay during this era. So has she really sold that well? Let’s not forget she owns several of the very top selling foreign albums of all-time in Japan so surely she moved some units. How many though? Her 90s decade was undoubtedly intense, but that is still only 10 years. Can she really challenge the all-time top sellers within such a short period of high sales?

As usual, I’ll be using the Commensurate Sales to Popularity Concept in order to relevantly gauge her results. The concept will not only bring you sales information for all Mariah Carey albums, physical singles, download singles, music videos and streaming, it will also accurately weight all this information to conclude the truth on meaningful popularity indicators. If you are not yet familiar with the CSPC idea, the next page explains it with a short video. I fully recommend you to check it out before getting into sales figures. Of course, if you are a regular visitor feel free to get straight into the sales figures. Let’s go!

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fancybytwice

I’m confused as to why some of her sales listed in this article are lower than other articles you mentioned her albums in, such as the “Fake 10 Million Seller” list which was posted before this article. You knocked down Rainbow and TEOM about 500k, and Daydream almost 2m. Can you explain why these are lower now?

Lest

When was the last update?

Certifications Matter

Maybe you should update your methodology. You claim Daydream was at 10.2 million in the US in 2017. It was certified 11x platinum last year. That means you were either off by close to 800k in 2017 for one album, in one country, which calls into question the accuracy of the rest of you claims, or she sold 800k equivalent units of Daydream since 2017, which is highly unlikely.

Martin

The 10.2m figure, solely relates to physical shipments (LPs, Cassettes, DATs, 8 Tracks, Mini Discs, CDs etc), in the US. The extra units come from sales of track downloads (included in album certification since 2004), ringtones (2006), audio streams (2013) and more recently video streams. It will also have had some actual physical sales since the 2017 figure.

So, maybe you should take the time to fully digest and understand what you are talking about, before you see fit to incorrectly castigate the sites methodologies and accuracy.

tsaotd

Asking once again for I know what you want to be included in charmbracelet streams since its present in the deluxe version of the album (here’s the link) https://open.spotify.com/album/60uzoZyNIXRVhhxTMHxe7P?si=y7wkZn4YTdSMLnzOeD8mnQ

WILLOWTAYTAY

RIAA is doing fake certification for mariah carey!
MTV Unplugged certified 4 x platinum as SHORT FORM ALBUM in 1994.
500,000 copies for a platinum unit.

Now they change the SHORT FORM ALBUM to STANDARD.

Now the album was shift from 2 million to 4 million without any update!
That’s rediculous
https://www.riaa.com/gold-platinum/?tab_active=default-award&ar=mariah+carey&ti=MTV+UNPLUGGED&lab=&genre=&format=Album&date_option=release&from=&to=&award=&type=&category=&adv=SEARCH#search_section

Ashlly Ferriols

This is not accurate because in 2003, Mariah Carey was awarded with Chopard Diamond Award at the World Music Awards in honor of over 150 million albums sales worldwide during physical sales era prior to the digital sales era (2004). Confirmed by Sony and EMI. That means she has already sold that much albums at that time therefore, some figures for her other albums are incomplete. Below is the breakdown of sales per album as of 2003: Mariah Carey  – 17 Million Emotions – 12.25 Million MTV Unplugged – 9.5 Million Music Box – 27 Million Merry Christmas – 15.8 Million… Read more »

aska

Awards and record labels orchestrate flattering stats for their artists, that’sbeen happening for years, it’s a promotional too. It’s like Elvis’ record label falsely claiming he’d sold 1 billion records for years now. It’s not based on the reality of the receipts. Not to mention, Carey blew up in the Soundscan era, so records for her total sales are quite accurate. She hasn’t sold 150 million albums by any metric.

ltjTK

The last data shows that Caution sold 100000 copies in the United States,18000 copies in China and 8000 copies in Japan

ltjTK

Caution sale:
US 110k
China 18k
Japan 9k
UK 8k
Canada 4k
Austria 2k
Others 5k
Total 156k

Alexandra P

I dont mind so much to get a full update, but it would be interesting to see how much Caution has sold after quite an underperformance.

Michael440

Billboard reported 250000 physical sales only but no clue about the rest of the world

TapestryCK

It’s not reported 250,000 physical sales.
https://twitter.com/chartdata/status/1132809895835836417
It sold nearly 100,000 copies by May 2019.
Then it drop out of the album sales chart

Michael440

Probably is the worldwide figure after all

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