CSPC: Titanic Popularity Analysis

titanic

You’rree heere, there’s nooothing I feaarr
And I knoooow that my heart will.. go oonnn
We’llll staay foreeeever this way
With these lyrics in our mind and the song will go on and on

It has now been 20 years since the release of the earthquake titled Titanic. The movie, its actors, the VHS, the DVD, the Soundtrack, its theme song, everything about it was utterly massive. During 4 months the entire World kept watching a ship sinking.

James Horner was naturally elected to compose the Soundtrack of this juggernaut project. The American conductor passed away in a plane crash 3 years ago this week. Before the sad event, he rose to fame thanks to his works on Star Trek, Aliens, Braveheart and Apollo 13 among others.

At first, the composition of the Titanic Soundtrack was given to Enya, who refused it. The Irish theme of the album made her an obvious first choice. Music tainted with Irish and Celts sounds was also incredibly popular at the time thanks to diverse acts like the aforementioned Enya but also the Corrs, ERA, the Cranberries and the huge Riverdance show. Horner perfectly translated these influences into the soundtrack. He was assisted by Norwegian legend Sissel who contributes with background vocals all along the record. Horner also added lyrics to one song and recorded it with the biggest global singer of the time: Céline Dion. The rest is history.

As usual, I’ll be using the Commensurate Sales to Popularity Concept in order to relevantly gauge its results. This concept will not only bring you sales information for Titanic‘s soundtrack, physical and download singles, as well as audio and video streaming. In fact, it will also determine its true popularity. If you are not yet familiar with the CSPC method, the next page explains it with a short video. I fully recommend watching the video before getting into the sales figures. Of course, if you are a regular visitor feel free to skip the video and get into the figures.

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francis

Can we get a quick breakdown of sales of My Heart Will Go On for each country/continent?
It’s interesting to see an overview of the 29.3m units EAS it got 💋

Anthony Blanchard

Hi francis!

Here is a breakdown per format:
– 22.72m EAS due to LTAL album
– 10.72m EAS due to Celine Dion other LPs
– 22.86m EAS due to Titanic album
– 3.47m EAS due to Titanic other LPs
– 2.07m EAS due to physical singles (6.91m units)
– 0.67m EAS due to digital singles (4.47m units)
– 0.24m EAS due to streaming

If we add everything, the total reaches 62.75m EAS!

francis

Thank u 😊

djdj

Titanic was Gold in Mexico by February 1998. So the “N/A” for Mexico can finally disappear. Also, it was 4xPlatinum in Thailand, 3x Platinum in Malaysia, 3xPlatinum in Singapore and Gold in Indonesia by then.
https://www.americanradiohistory.com/Archive-Music-and-Media/90s/1998/MM-1998-02-28.pdf
And it sold 230k in the Philippines by April 1999.
https://books.google.com.ph/books?id=Pg0EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA77&dq=titanic+soundtrack+230000&hl=zh-CN&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwianOWYzPDjAhWU6nMBHUJyBcIQ6AEILzAC#v=onepage&q=titanic%20soundtrack%20230000&f=false

RLAAMJR.

HUrray! 🙂

francis

Do you have like a breakdown of sales for MHWGO?

orange

Amazing that 3 of the top albums of the 90s were released within weeks of eachother. It would be interesting to see a year-by-year comparison of how many units were sold by the albums from each year, rather than sold during each year. My guess is that you would see a lot more random variation between the years and market size having less impact, though of course it would also skew in favour of older albums since they’ve had more time to accumulate catalog sales. (Also, a minor note about the first page of the article, “tainted” might not be… Read more »

orange

That’s fascinating! I expected big gaps but not to that huge of a level. I suppose missing albums (especially from smaller acts that probably won’t be analyzed) also contribute to those differences, but clearly some years happened to produce more iconic music than others!