Britney Spears is the most successful female artist who debuted in the last 25 years. She has made it big in all the relevant music markets. How does she perform in smaller markets like Russia or the Philippines? Or even truly irrelevant markets like Belarus and Bangladesh? Thanks to the global heatmap, we can do more than just guesstimate.
Madonna is a global icon. She is known to be a superstar all around the world. Even if you did well everywhere, there will always be markets where you do better than others. What’s the heatmap of her success? It’s time to draw its picture!
There is always excitement around the release of an album. Fans are eagerly waiting to hear new music, media are curious about what will happen, and chart geeks can’t wait to see the first results come in from iTunes, Spotify, Hits Daily Double, and Billboard.
The Eagles‘ Greatest Hits 1971-1975 sold 38 million copies in the US, making it the best selling album of all-time in the country. That’s a good story, at least good enough to make headlines of major American media for a pair of days. Many will simply think “wow!” when reading about it, charts followers’ reaction has been “How?” yet.
If you are lonesome tonight, you may have enough time to read the highly anticipated CSPC article of Elvis Presley… or you may not. His discography is so massive that at some point Chartmasters’ team though this work would never be completed. Now the challenge is on your side to go through all information available!
Charts-excluded budget releases, CDs issued thanks to loopholes, direct marketing series, albums from state-owned labels, etc… the number of Elvis Presley‘s records that remained out of the spotlight was huge. The revolution brought by Discogs means their sales to consumers can now be accurately gauged.
Through the years, the charts and sales community have been accessing more and more information. Areas of sales that remained black boxes for long are now kind of familiar, for example music clubs and sales in some Latin American and Asian markets. A couple of months ago, I presented a new way to accurately gauge success with the help of YouTube Insights, providing a method to put numbers based on factual information rather than wild guessing. Today, I’m happy to say that the wild guessing era is over. A massively powerful tool fills in every data hole that remained up to now. Here is how to move from subjective estimations to accurate systematic processes.
It’s hard to not forget about Elvis Presley’s EP sales. Not that they are weak, but this format disappeared so long ago that when talking about records sales we tend to think about singles and albums only. Introduced to the market in 1952 by his upcoming label, RCA, EPs were still struggling until the arrival of the legendary rocker.
If his album sales are subject to various utopic myths, Elvis Presley‘s singles sales aren’t a mystery at all. Fact is, he sold an insane number of them. More than anyone who debuted after him, that means more than the Beatles, among many others.
A few days ago we went through the 101 albums by Elvis Presley that have been certified by the RIAA in the US. While it was already an enormous task, that was only one part of the picture. In fact, less than a third of his official US releases achieved a Gold award or better.