I was listening to the radio the other day at work and one of my favorite lines ever came through the speaker and tickled the erogenous zone in my ear:
“Hey, this is Chad from Nickelback and you’re listening to ….”
You can insert any station in there, it doesn’t matter what their format is, because Nickelback transcends musical classification/formats.
I started thinking about Chad, his sweet perm thing, and Nickelback’s music. It’s shitty music. Almost everyone I know believes this to be true. Why then, have they sold 12.5 million albums in the US alone? Does anyone reading this know anyone who has bought any of their albums? I don’t think I do.
Anyway, while looking up how many records they’ve sold, I came across the lists of all-time record sales, and I found it interesting.
For instance, the #1 album in US sales of all time is…. The Eagles (Greatest Hits 1971-1975). These dudes sold 29 million albums of their best songs written in a 4 year period. 29,000,000, incidentally, happens to be the population of Iraq (28,993,000). They are followed by Michael Jackson (Thriller), Led Zeppelin (Led Zeppelin IV), Pink Floyd (The Wall), and AC/DC (Back in Black). Only 2 of the top five bands/artists are actually American.
The Eagles actually have the #15 album as well, with Hotel California. Hotel California sold 16 million albums, the same amount as Elton John’s greatest hits, Physical Graffiti by Led Zeppelin, No Fences by Garth Brooks, Alanis Morrissette’s Jagged Little Pill and the Hootie and the Fucking Blowfish opus, Cracked Rear-View. Hootie may have been my biggest WTF moment, but others soon followed, like the Backstreet Boys with 14 million sold (Backstreet Boys), then another 13 million with Millennium, which tied with Britney Spears and …Baby One More Time. Speakerboxx/The Love Below, possibly their worst album, sold 11 million copies. For how big of a celebrity Madonna is, I would have thought she would have sold more than 10 million of a single album of hers, but she never did. Two of her albums hit 10 million, the same total as Linkin Park and the Lion King soundtrack.
As far as cumulative albums sales go though, Madonna ranks #13 with 63 million albums sold, the Beatles rank first with 169 million. The top five, in fact, is the Beatles, Elvis Presley, Garth Brooks, Led Zeppelin and The Eagles. Garth Brooks is the only one that I and most of you can say that we lived in the period in which he/they performed. Mariah Carey is 16th, one spot ahead of Michael fucking Jackson. Mariah Carey has sold 61.5 million records in the US. Does anyone reading this currently own a Mariah Carey album? Did you know Sade has sold more albums (22.5 million) in the US than Greenday (22 million), Credence Clearwater Revival (22 million), Jimi Hendrix (22 million) or Genesis (21.5 million)? That sounds like the work of the Brain Fucklers.
So what to make out of all of this?
I really can’t say, but Nickelback’s selling 12.5 million albums kind of took a back seat when I saw some of the other batshit that sold more. DMX (14 million)? The Offspring (14.5)? Madness. The buying habits of the American music listeners is(are?) something I'll probably never understand, especially when it comes to entertainment. The fact that Snoop Dogg has only sold 12 million albums, 500,000 less than Nickelback and 4 million less than Limp Bizkit tells me that.
Labels: Brain Fucklers, Chad from Nickelback, Sade, Sweet Perms
3 Comments:
You forgot to mention the pink lipstick accompanying that perm thing.
In terms of sales - is there a way to base these figures against other relevant bands popular at the same time?
I have to believe that there are trends in album purchasing popularity, purchasing power, marketing, population, the state of radio/advertising/pay radio, social importance (of music) coming into play here.
For example - taking into account varying factors (including internet downloading) - couldn't you extrapolate out a Madonna or CCR album to exceed Hootie or BSB?
Also - taking into account the MTV generation - is it really that suprising that millions of retarded kids who just happened to be of the correct age when TRL exploded ate the shit out of Offspring (probably the least talented, most generic sounding band of all time) and BSB? Could this have influenced there parents and or the in between generation to get the Blowfish fever?
If you look at record sales - they have "slowed" and are certainly under estimates in terms of what would have been predicted prior to the advent of internet pirating - but they have yet to experience negative growth - meaning more albums are still being sold today than in the 70s or 80s.
Also - if you look back at the whole culture thing - if you take dazed and confused as a historical document - you only needed to sell one 8 track per high school class because they all hung out together and listened to the radio most of the time.
And - if today's music scene is as watered down as I believe it to be due to different mediums as well as an abundance of $$ at the label level and for promotions - is it that surprising that one or two bands that in essence suck can gain superstardom momentarily - and in today's greedy culture, attack the need for instant gratification and release numerous records in a short time span to capatilize on the dizzying yet unfounded popularity?
Basically - I think record sails are like the price of gas or the real estate market - subject to typical inflation and periodically affected by retardedly unrealistic ebbs and flows. I think a more qualitative method should be applied to index these numbers against an agreed upon market level that can be applied to any era's economic models and curves without bias.
Come back at me when you have that research done.
Well, we can kind of do what you’re looking for if we normalize some things. If we make the playing field level, we can get a better idea of sales across different eras. This is going to be very, probably overly, simplistic, but here goes.
US Populations by Decade:
2000 ~ 287,000,000
1990 ~ 254,000,000
1980 ~ 231,000,000
1970 ~ 209,000,000
1960 ~ 180,000,000
I’ll stop there since most of the records on the list were made/purchased in that time frame. Now, if we take an average US population since 1960 it would be 232,200,000, which is roughly the 80’s. So, Nickelback’s 12.5 million albums sold in the 2000’s would equal around 10.1 million albums in our average world.
The tricky thing is that The Eagles sell records in every decade, not just the 60’s and 70’s. I can’t find any information on sales by decade, so to be consistently overly generic, we could say that 75% of an album’s sales come in the decade in which it was produced, and the rest comes later. This is probably very wrong, and quite possibly a hot button topic in this whole debate, but I’ll shift it to the side for now. The Eagles: 75% of 29 million = 21,750,000. 21,750,000 albums in the 70’s = approx 24,000,000 records sold in our average America. With the remaining 7,250,000 albums, you could split them up in the last three decades and get these normalized sales: 2,430,000 in the 80’s, 2,210,000 in the 90’s and 1,955,000 in the 00’s, giving you a grand total of 30,595,000, which adds around 1 million records to their total simply based on population and availability and the like.
Hootie’s landmark record, though, I have a little more info on. They sold 9,817,666 out of their 16,000,000 albums in the 90’s. It just occurred to me that my 75% decade rule can be thrown out the window. Anyway, 9,817,666 in the 90’s = 8,870,000 in the average America, over 1 million sales lost. The 6,182,334 albums sold in the 00’s would equal out to about 5,000,000 records normalized, giving Hootie a grand total of 13,870,000, shaving 2,130,000 records off of their total. That makes me feel a bit better.
Madonna’s Like a Virgin, 10,000,000 sold and produced in the 80’s, would have a normalized total of almost exactly 10,000,000, as most albums produced in the 80’s would, since their decade is closest to the average. Hootie still smokes it by 3+ mill.
The other thing that can skew these numbers is the damned internet. More people bought the Eagles because they couldn’t pirate it or download it back then. How many sales are lost due to the series of tubes? It depends on what you read, some say there is no decline in sales, some say there is a ton. It just depends on who’s signing your checks I guess.
Either way, The Eagles kick everyone’s ass.
It should be noted that I am terrible at math and flunked out of college. There are many other factors involved here, and I will try to keep thinking of them, at least for another 15 minutes or so until naked pics of Halle Berry or a funny video of a dude getting drilled in the nuts distracts me, then all bets are off.
I happen to own Cracked Rear View, Emancipation of Mimi AND Charmbracelet, plus Silver Side Up and Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water so how you like them fucking apples champ? Someone you know does play a part in shaping the titans of American pop music.
Great post by the way.
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