CSPC: Paul Simon 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.

How to understand this table? If you check this example, those figures mean Greatest Hits, Etc sold 3,410,000 units worldwide. The second statistics column means all versions of all the songs included on this package add for 213,880 equivalent album sales from streams of all types.

The second part at the right of the table shows how many streams are coming from each original album plus the share it represents on the overall package streams. Thus, streaming figures tell us Paul Simon songs are responsible for 52% of the Greatest Hits, Etc tracklist attractiveness, which means it generated 1,760,000 of its 3,410,000 album sales. We will now apply this concept to all his compilations.