CSPC: Michael Jackson 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 – Part 1 – Compilations #1
How to understand this table? If you check for example the The Best Of Michael Jackson compilation line, those figures mean it sold 2,500,000 units worldwide. The second statistics column means all versions of all the songs included on this package add for 82,000 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 Got To Be There are responsible for 53% of the The Best Of Michael Jackson track list attractiveness. This means it generated 1,333,000 of its 2,500,000 album sales and so forth for the other records.
Except a singles pack, this list is full of Motown compilations covering the early albums of Michael Jackson. The 1975 set was the first choice of fans newly gained by later successes which increased its sales for many years. As Got To Be There includes 4 out of the 5 big hits from Motown, it is responsible for the majority of the sales of most of the compilations.
In some cases, like 18 Greatest Hits, the package was shared with the Jackson 5 which means Michael Jackson isn’t rewarded 100% of its sales. Those situations are indeed more favorable to the group as I Want You Back and ABC are the most popular songs from the entire Motown period.