CSPC: Shania Twain Popularity Analysis

I won’t lie, I won’t tell you she’ll return soon. With no album release in 14 years, a comeback for Shania Twain was more than rumoured this year with the Country legend tweeting pictures of recording sessions. However, it didn’t happen. Nevertheless, that is no reason to ignore her past discography which features some true stand-out moments.

It all started rather late for the artist who managed to get her first album out at 28, the age Rihanna is today. This late start was also pretty slow as her eponymous debut was unnoticed by everyone. Everyone except Robert John “Mutt” Lange, the legendary producer of AC/DC, Def Leppard, Foreigner and Bryan Adams’ biggest records. After hearing her, Lange decided to produce her upcoming albums – and also to marry her, something we can’t really blame him for.

Both talents added together took North America and then the world by storm during the second half of the 90s. Among country stars, some have been able to sell a few records elsewhere like Garth Brooks in Ireland and the UK or Willie Nelson in Australasia. None of them got the strength of crossing over most of the world, none that is until Shania Twain.

Often when something unusual happens like such a crossover, the Media overreact and their coverage makes it look much bigger than it really was. What’s the truth? Where has the singer been successful and how just how successful was she? Let apply the Commensurate Sales to Popularity Concept to provide answers.

As a reminder for users who are not yet familiar with the CSPC you do not need to worry, it is quite simple as it only consists in merging every format sales an artist has been getting and attributing them to respective studio albums. We will start by focusing on raw data, setting how much each Shania Twain album sold. Then, we will check sales of each track from those albums on each format – physical, digital and streaming – and weight them to value those figures on a par with album sales. To complete the study, we will study sales of all the compilations, live albums and music videos she dropped. Once all the raw data is set, we will only need to apply appropriate weighting to get the overall picture of the most missed country artist’s career results.

Let’s go!