CSPC: Usher 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 for example the OMG Tour Live From London music video line, those figures mean it sold 125,000 units worldwide. The second statistics column means all versions of all the songs included on this package add for 872,000 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 Confessions are responsible for 39% of the OMG Tour Live From London track list attractiveness. This means it generated 49,000 of its 125,000 album sales and so forth for the other records.

The first 3 live products issued from 1999 to 2002 are logically dominated by tracks from My Way, 8701 and then Confessions songs take over part of the attractiveness of those packages in later years. The Versus EP is a great addition to Raymond v Raymond.