Evergreen Albums
Top 10 Commercially Important Albums
675 Eagles, Eagles Greatest Hits
660 Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin IV
594 The Beatles, The Beatles (White Album)
506 Pink Floyd, The Wall
494 Michael Jackson, Thriller
432 Fleetwood Mac, Rumours
420 The Beatles, The Beatles 1967-1970
420 Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon
405 Elton John, Greatest Hits
400 Boston, Boston
Top 10 Commercially Important Artist Careers
4129 The Beatles
2625 Led Zeppelin
2328 Hollywood Movie Soundtracks
2262 Elvis Presley
1759 Various (collections/label promo)
1508 Eagles
1453 Pink Floyd
1381 Billy Joel
1311 Elton John
1154 Barbra Streisand
This is a study of long-term album sales trends using data taken from the Recording Industry Association of America's web site. The data is downloadable as text files for further analysis- my primary interest in doing this study was to work out which albums and artists have been able to drive long-term sales even after record industry hype had moved on to other, newer records, and whether there were any surprises in the data. There were.
The numbers you will see are the product of two different numbers relating to each record- number of platinums (millions) sold, and the number of years an album has been on the market. I felt an adjustment was necessary for several reasons: first, the whole purpose of the study is to identify longterm sellers. There is no such thing as a longterm seller over one year or eight months: I'm thinking more in terms of people still buying the album ten, twenty, thirty years later. As such, weighting older albums is obligatory. Second, the total sales of RIAA-tracked albums has exploded- particularly in recent years. To some extent this is affected by a concentration of sales on relatively few albums, which is an observation I will explore, but it is also evidence of a market that's been expanding to date- and if I was to just count millions, newer albums would be unnaturally weighted, apparently very important but with very little justification for this. Britney Spears is NOT more historically important than The Beatles- she fits into a long established category dating back to The Monkees, and even earlier than that. There is considerable evidence to suggest that when Britney stops being pushed on the market by her record company, sales will fall off a cliff- in contrast to some other artists, who are more capable of establishing a sustained career.
That is the purpose of this study- to examine what's happening with industry practices, who's being sold, and what the artists with sustained careers have in common.
The base data file is EvergreenAlbumsAlphabetical.txt (108K). Also available is the total list sorted as the most commercially important albums ever, and the list broken down into artist careers by adding all the albums for each artist together. The top 10 of each are what you see leading off this page.
EvergreenAlbumsAlphabetical.txt is the complete RIAA database as sorted by artist- if you're wanting to look up a particular artist, this would be the quickest way to go about it. This file introduces the record format- a 'score' number which is zero-filled and represents the number of certified platinums times the number of years since the album's release, then the artist name (alphabetised on last name), then the album name. For instance, here is Bruce Springsteen's platinum albums:
255 Bruce Springsteen, Born In The U.S.A.
156 Bruce Springsteen, Born To Run
195 Bruce Springsteen, Bruce Springsteen & E Street Band Live 1975-85
069 Bruce Springsteen, Darkness On The Edge Of Town
024 Bruce Springsteen, Greatest Hits
056 Bruce Springsteen, Greetings From Asbury Park, New Jersey
009 Bruce Springsteen, Human Touch
000 Bruce Springsteen, Live In New York City
009 Bruce Springsteen, Lucky Town
019 Bruce Springsteen, Nebraska
063 Bruce Springsteen, The River
056 Bruce Springsteen, The Wild, The Innocent, & The E Street Shuffle
003 Bruce Springsteen, Tracks
042 Bruce Springsteen, Tunnel Of Love
Already, there are many suggestive points to this reckoning. As almost everyone on the planet knows, "Born In The U.S.A" was Bruce's biggest album. But how about in the light of historical perspective? In that light, Bruce's first two albums were very important, and "Born To Run" broke him to a larger audience. Also note the following observation:
069 Bruce Springsteen, Darkness On The Edge Of Town
056 Bruce Springsteen, Greetings From Asbury Park, New Jersey
063 Bruce Springsteen, The River
056 Bruce Springsteen, The Wild, The Innocent, & The E Street Shuffle
Take out "Born In The U.S.A" and "Born To Run", both instances in which the record company geared up to sell ludicrous numbers of records, and Bruce's albums tend to approximate to roughly the same number! This also holds for other acts-
026 Dan Fogelberg, Captured Angel
057 Dan Fogelberg, Greatest Hits
050 Dan Fogelberg, Netherlands
042 Dan Fogelberg, Phoenix
054 Dan Fogelberg, Souvenirs
052 Dan Fogelberg, The Innocent Age
023 Dan Fogelberg & Tim Weisberg, Twin Sons Of Different Mothers
Dan Fogleberg also shows this characteristic- a capacity for consistently selling double platinum over the duration. This is useful to know. In some cases, an artist will maintain a steady average and then exceed it from time to time:
084 Pat Benatar, Crimes Of Passion
019 Pat Benatar, Get Nervous
022 Pat Benatar, In The Heat Of The Night
018 Pat Benatar, Live From Earth
040 Pat Benatar, Precious Time
017 Pat Benatar, Tropico
Pat Benatar has four platinum albums in the 17-22 range (primarily illustrating a time period during which she routinely went single platinum- the equivalent of multiplatinum today). Not all acts follow this pattern, as obvious as it seems- consider-
400 Boston, Boston
161 Boston, Don't Look Back
004 Boston, Greatest Hits
060 Boston, Third Stage
007 Boston, Walk On
Boston, of course, was the studio production of the perfectionist Tom Scholz, and though the first album was enormously influential, there were such long delays between albums that Boston didn't sustain the career they might have, even though the one album was more commercially important than many artists' entire careers.
In some cases, the artist is able to keep a momentum going after a monster debut album- such as Guns'N Roses, a determined band with a distinctive sound and featuring opinionated and colorful musicians:
210 Guns'N Roses, Appetite For Destruction
065 Guns'N Roses, G'N R Lies
008 Guns'N Roses, The Spaghetti Incident?
070 Guns'N Roses, Use Your Illusion I
070 Guns'N Roses, Use Your Illusion II
Contrast this with what happens to a competent band that gets swept up in a storm of record-label media hype. Hootie & The Blowfish are nowhere near as offensive or controversial as G'N'R, but unfortunately they do not show the capacity to drive sustained sales like G'N'R have.
112 Hootie & The Blowfish, Cracked Rear View
015 Hootie & The Blowfish, Fairweather Johnson
003 Hootie & The Blowfish, Musical Chairs
Yet in some ways this isn't Hootie's fault- because there's evidence to suggest that the nature of record label hype had changed by the time Hootie came around. G'N'R represent the very last wave of career bands, and the pattern of promotion given Hootie was NOT the same. A good example is in Warrant, which illustrates some of the things my numbers do NOT show...
022 Warrant, Cherry Pie
024 Warrant, Dirty Rotten Filthy Stinking Rich
Seems normal enough- but when you look at the certification dates, Warrant went double platinum within a year- and then it's been ten years since then, without an additional platinum! This is not the same pattern as the career bands of earlier days, not the same pattern as G'N'R. It is evidence of a shift in record promotion between the mid-80s and the mid-90s towards stuffing the channel full of an album, selling as many copies as possible, and then completely letting the artist drop. There are very few acts post-1990 that can boast platinum certifications more than a year after release. The pattern is hit-and-run, and the change is striking- and given the numbers involved in the music business, damning. In an industry where the top acts will sell ten, fifteen, eighteen platinums, it is revealing when an act goes multiplatinum in months and then stops selling when the label stops stuffing the channel full of the album.
There is substantial risk to this strategy, and the reasons for it can only be guessed at. Musicians of previous decades have commented on the industry's abandonment of artist development with some rancor, but to understand the reasons you have to look beyond just the artists' capacity for longterm sales, and consider the bargaining position of an act with a track record for multiplatinum sales. That act has a lot of bargaining power. They probably have their own lawyers and business team- this is obligatory for a band even wishing to operate on those levels, and label-appointed lawyers will not do. In every way, such a band is capable of extracting the maximum royalty (still rather small compared to what the public thinks artists get) from the record label.
In contrast to that- if the record company picks up a naive unknown and pumps the sales channel full of their debut album, they can hang on to a lot more of the money once you subtract the enormous costs of independent promotion and all the apparatus of modern payola- which the record labels are stuck paying, if they want to sell any records at all.
The promoters will just as happily push Hanson as Bob Dylan, Spice Girls as Aretha Franklin: they are completely agnostic on the quality front. They are the mechanism through which it's more profitable for the labels to churn through new and manufactured artists (Spice Girls, Britney Spears, 'N Sync, Dixie Chicks- it applies to all genres) than it is to build extended careers and trade off the capacity for an artist to develop a reputation that drives continued sales. In effect, the record labels cannot afford to build artist careers anymore. They can only afford to milk the current promotional mechanism.
The risk of this strategy is this: it assumes the promotional mechanism will maintain its relevance. If at any point, the mechanism of radio and extremely selective retail CD sales loses its relevance, the record industry is left holding rights to many, many acts that were _planned_ to fail. Rather than holding rights on artists that can continue to keep a relevance in new mediums and modes of sales, the labels end up heavily overinvested in acts that were never meant to have a future- in effect, they have spent all their money on immediate promotional needs and nothing for artist development. The artist is turned into an impoverished formula with no particular ability to adapt to changing conditions. This stops being a good thing when you have to rely on the artist's own talent to drive additional sales.
As an aside, to some extent you can't expect too much from the labels. It tells you something when on the official RIAA site dedicated to honoring the very artists that have earned the RIAA the most money, they get actual names wrong. They have Kim Carnes as "Kim Karnes". The Rembrandts went platinum as well: the RIAA site lists them as "The Rembrants". There are too many missing or erroneous release dates to even count, but highlights: The Rolling Stones 'Black And Blue': missing release date. 'Undercover', missing release date. Rush, "Fly By Night"- release date given as 1982, really 1975- but to top it off, Rush's "Permanent Waves" is listed as "Permanent Wave"! This is the album containing the immortal 'Spirit Of Radio' and a band with thirteen platinum albums, you'd think they'd get the name right- of course, the Rolling Stones have TWENTY-FIVE platinum albums and the RIAA cannot be bothered to look up a simple release date on the page supposedly honoring them, a task that would take about ten seconds. Steely Dan's "Gaucho" from 1980 is also lacking a release date, which would probably really annoy Fagen and Becker... likewise Barbra Streisand's "Songbird" and "Wet", from another artist who in this case has given the music industry 27 platinum albums from 1965 to now... and "Face Dances" and "The Kids Are Alright" by The Who...
However, this is just whining- the RIAA invites such mockery by their current attitudes and their disregard for the artists that they purportedly represent. What is more interesting is investigating trends in what they're doing, as well as the merits of the actual artists- and here, too, there are striking discoveries. At the very top of this page is the top ten artist careers of commercial importance- yet #3 is Hollywood Movie soundtracks, which actually outweighs Elvis, and #5 is Broadway shows. What is going on here? One word. Convergence.
There are good reasons for Hollywood soundtracks to get much attention from the music industry- the labels can try to ride on the promotional budgets of the motion picture industry, there's again no need for artist career development, the whole thing can be written off as work for hire quite plausibly- all in all, it makes sense. What is startling is the sheer scope of this activity. It is amazing just how heavily Hollywood treads in this area, and the consequences to musicians attempting to maintain careers in the mainstream music industry against the odds are very ominous. Hollywood is bigger than Elvis- no working artist can hope to compete for shelf space with this manifestation of convergence. Of the top 5 artist careers ever, not only does Hollywood outweigh every other 'artist' but Zeppelin and The Beatles, every single actual band in the top 5 is dead. Hollywood has never been more alive in the music industry.
Even with a cursory check of only soundtracks getting no more or less than one platinum album, between 1987 and 1994 this amounted to 26 soundtracks going platinum. But that's nothing to what happened then- between 1995 and 2000 it adds up to 47 soundtracks going platinum! There is not a year with less than seven movie soundtracks selling a million records. In 1998 alone ten movie soundtracks went platinum! When you consider this in the light of the consolidation of rack jobbers and their rise to greater power in the industry, it tells a very ominous story- even musicians who are being backed by their labels may lose out to the greater market pressure exerted by the MPAA movie studios and their desire for soundtrack revenue. The average number of soundtracks going platinum between '86 and '89 was 2 1/2, with much greater store catalog breadth. The average number of soundtracks going platinum between 1997 and 2000 was eight, with store catalog breadth much narrower and harder to compete for. This is convergence writ large and virtually impossible to fight...
However, this must be understood in context. Through these figures, we are looking at a severe narrowing and weeding-out of the traditional music retail channel. Between the acquisitions of Clear Channel Communications on the radio end, the ascendance of the rack jobbers, the sharply increasing pressure of Hollywood for a share of the dwindling store space, even the profound narrowing of Top 40 Radio over the last 20 years (meaning the death of AOR and R&B; stations), we are not only looking at an impossible tightening and restricting within the retail music channel, we are also looking at a narrowing of the retail music channel.
If you define the music business as strictly what happens within the retail music channel, the progression of these events has been entirely logical and sensible. However, if you define the music business as part of a larger commerce environment, or indeed a social environment, another story is told. In effect, through these developments the RIAA is pricing itself out of the entertainment market- much as Clear Channel has led to decreased radio listenership by throttling that channel.
Result: Napster.
Napster is effectively dead, but the concept it represents couldn't be more different from the state of the retail music channel today. The easy thing is to focus entirely on the free nature of the service as it existed. You copied patterns of bits, and got a crude, sometimes skipping facsimile of the music you wanted to hear, without paying anything for it. The reality of this was so obvious, that it conceals other, more important aspects of the situation, which should be of more concern to the RIAA.
Napster, as it existed, was the ultimate Internet music store- and it is crucial to understand the change in meaning behind those three simple words. Traditional music stores offered a selection of music for sale. Modern retail music is the result of a bitter fight to be included in a much narrower selection- from top 40 to rack jobbers, every step of the way the trend has been to reduce inventory levels, to stock fewer selections and make it up on volume. This impoverishes choice, but choice does not necessarily make money for the RIAA- sales does. Compared to that, only part of Napster's appeal was current hits for free. The rest of Napster's appeal was in offering something no retail store could ever offer- very nearly the history of recorded music, searchable and downloadable. This is only a slight exaggeration- compared to modern retail outlets, Napster's peak was almost like having the history of recorded music at your fingertips. There was much overlap, but if only one person with a certain obscure item was logged on, you had it. The effect was of a store inventory hundreds, thousands of times greater than any physical store.
That this was compelling, that this produced a peer-to-peer craze that even now refuses to die, says more about the Napster users than the simple fact that they liked downloading inferior dubs of music for free. In earlier years, Napster may have garnered much less attention- people could have been disgusted at the many poor or incomplete files, people could have ignored the whole thing knowing that they could buy the real CDs at a real store.
But in the modern world, the consumer cannot do that: the pressures of the music business have led to a wild constriction of consumer choice in mainstream retail outlets, on mainstream radio- in every respect. The degree of control is so extreme that it's no longer possible to buy stuff unless it is mainstream, and record label execs forthwith proceed to study the market and try their level best to produce composite, synthetic musicians and bands that can appeal to the largest or most profitable sections of the market.
The trouble there is an error of market research. Only those completely uninformed of market research and advertising are prone to believe that there is an average consumer to be targetted by marketing: the reality of the situation is that differentiation is king. The only purpose to consolidation is to make things practical: even though car buyers might want 10,000 different colors, it is impractical to offer more than a few, because you have to maintain inventories. Even though music consumers, when left uncontrolled (as in the Electronic genres) break apart into a wild profusion of incomprehensible genres, it is impractical to stock thirty thousand different sorts of music in a physical, retail store.
But- as illustrated by what happened to the Electronic genre- the Internet is not a physical store. Given the capacity to copy music at no significant cost from any of a million different storage places, the natural tendency for any consumer is to begin the process of differentiation. Once this starts it doesn't stop- the person cultivates their own tastes and pursues additional differentiations among what is available to them.
Particularly with the current climate of commercial music and the increasing narrowness of the traditional retail channel, vast numbers of musicians have been forced onto the Internet. Some are good, some are not. Some were enjoying success in the 60s and 70s, some weren't even born then. But they can all appreciate a situation in which they can distribute their music (good or bad) at little or no cost to them. When music is just bits, you don't have to stay up all night dubbing cassettes. You don't have to buy 1000 vinyl pressings just to get your work out there. You can rush it out, you can take risks because your capital investments are far smaller, you can get your product onto an impossibly huge 'shelf' in an impossibly huge 'store'. It may not pay you directly- but neither did the traditional industry, most of the time. It certainly does not guarantee you attention or publicity- but, again, the traditional industry has never been very rewarding to people who didn't promote themselves.
In that context, it can be said with great confidence that if the record industry attempts to reproduce the situation of modern retail sales online, doing nothing more than charging for digital copies of the very small number of artists currently occupying the shelves of retail outlets, they are doomed for two specific reasons:
One- this course of action offers extremely poor differentiation compared with either illegal peer-to-peer trading or the often sketchier offerings of poorly resourced Internet musicians releasing their works for free intentionally;
Two- the record industry's increasing reliance on manufactured taste as defined by a channel whose future is in question leads it to what could be considered profit-taking: trying desperately to cash in by abandoning all artist career development and relying entirely on transient, manufactured artists with no serious potential for long-term sales.
This is a very dangerous prospect. The music industry is, in essence, relying on a radio market that Clear Channel is driving people away from, relying on convergence with Hollywood for volume sales, and getting rid of the bulk of the established artists that could soften a transition to new forms of media and music distribution.
In doing this, the music industry is itself producing the conditions for an explosive transition to other forms of music distribution more capable of differentiation. This is evidenced in Napster's proliferation, but it is very important to understand that cost-consciousness is not the only issue, as it sometimes seemed with the Napster story.
For the music industry: There are several possible avenues for action. On the one hand, the industry can try and reverse its course and focus on artist development. This would cost money and could lead to the destruction of any single label that tries this course, as other labels out-compete the one that's trying to plan for the future. The industry can also try to address the threat of Internet differentiation directly: for instance, trying to gain a position as 'toll-booth' over any and all Internet music including that of independents, or trying to threaten all ISPs and OMDs into abandoning attempts to host unsigned musicians. These are if anything even more dangerous- they risk both complete alienation of the music industry's existing customers, and the failure of the attempts to assert this control. There's no compelling case that the RIAA should be given authority to silence artists who are not signed to RIAA contracts. The self-interest of it is the only possible reason for it, and it's very questionable that such an approach would be allowed to succeed. It would be seen as an infringement on civil liberties.
For everybody else: The time to look to the music industry for a career is over. There is absolutely no future in it. What this means is, other opportunities will be opening up. It's possible that nobody understands what these will be yet- Napster is far from a blueprint for the future. Doing business on the Internet, at least in terms of promotion and 'free goods', is a given. Make sure that option remains open. People like free things, but many also are quite willing to spend money: the question is whether it will work to ask them to spend money on bits, intangible data that can be lost with a hard drive crash. It is very unlikely that 'pay-per-listen' will ever meet with success: the value proposition is far too weak. Since CDs are extraordinarily ubitiquous, and future players can easily continue to play CDs even while adding other, more restrictive formats, CDs will likely continue to have value as a tangible that people will be willing to buy to express their support for an artist. If noncommercial copying is permitted, this further strengthens the CD's position as it can be used as a high-fidelity source for any number of digital music encoding formats. The problem will continue to be finding publicity despite lack of traditional-media channels (expect to be entirely locked out). This is where the lessons of continued career sales take on heightened importance: producing authentic, high-quality material is so overwhelmingly important that it is more valuable than doing any promotion! There's a lot of evidence in recent years of online internet OMDs to suggest that any time spent promoting in traditional music-industry ways is time wasted. The whole context is different- when listeners have infinite variety and choice, the only sensible priority is to place full emphasis on the music and allow people to discover that at their own pace. This flies in the face of conventional, retail-and-top-40-and-Billboard-magazine wisdom, but it works on the Internet. It works to build careers over the long term, and to cheaply and easily bring them up to roughly the amount of popularity the artist can ever achieve: you cannot become overexposed in this way, because the popularity remains entirely audience-driven and all promotion rests with the fans themselves.
It will indeed be interesting to see these two sides clash in the arena of popular taste.
Again, the base data file is EvergreenAlbumsAlphabetical.txt (108K). Also available is the total list sorted as the most commercially important albums ever, and the list broken down into artist careers by adding all the albums for each artist together. The top 10 of each are what you see leading off this page.
Addendum- I wanted to try and see what would happen if I took career averages of the biggest artists- so I've got a new file to play with. The trouble was, almost all the data returned garbage. Iron Butterfly's In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida scored absurdly high because it was so old and the 'average' returned nothing but that one record- Carole King's "Tapestry" also produced absurdly high scores- finally I decided it was bad enough trying to sort out what this could be showing, without the added confusion of stuff that doesn't even fit into the concept of an 'average', and I deleted all bands that did not have at least two platinum albums that were not Greatest Hits albums. Exit Iron Butterfly, etc. The resulting sorted list is still perplexing: here's its top 10.
188 Led Zeppelin
151 Eagles
146 Michael Jackson
130 The Beatles
126 Boston
119 Meat Loaf
110 Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
108 Simon & Garfunkel
105 Fleetwood Mac
104 Pink Floyd
As you can see, there's still unreasonable weight on, say, Meat Loaf (thanks to Bat Out Of Hell) but there were at least other acts with ten, twenty, thirty albums, and with these, the averaging at least illustrates something. There's an element of consistency in there- the Led Zeppelin formula, the Eagles formula, the Michael Jackson formula, even the Boston formula though the averaging has little to work with there- although the whole list is screwy and full of noise, it does seem to illustrate the necessity for a consistent, identifiable sound to drive consistent record sales. This can even be simply a performer- Janis Joplin rates at #12 on this list- or a type of pop- Whitney Houston's #20, Journey is #11... the possibly very obvious point is that a very clear formula (or flavor, or spell, whatever you want to call it) is needed to be certain of _consistent_ sales. And yet, at the same time, acts that have broken formula, such as The Beatles, have been able to hit momentary peaks of sales ability far in excess of the limitations of the formula- while on the other hand, Elvis, who rates highly by almost any standard, pulls only a #45 on this list- for the obvious reason that he faded into obscurity on a long endless string of lame albums and repackagings.
So on the one hand, relying on a rigid formula can be restricting, but on the other hand, pioneering a new formula (as Led Zeppelin did) can be very rewarding to the pioneer. No Led Zeppelin Greatest Hits albums were really necessary- the albums themselves served that purpose, defining a new area in rock which was further explored by many- none of whom could begin to approach the sheer consistency of the list-toppers here. In particular, the more artistically experimental bands by their very nature would tend to blow holes in their own sales from time to time- if every Pink Floyd album was counted, not just the platinums, its average would drop like a brick! By contrast, almost every Zeppelin album IS counted- likewise with Boston, with Meat Loaf, Michael Jackson and so on. And in the case of The Beatles, by far the most commercially important band in history- their very experimentation that contributed to their having a greater cultural influence than Led Zeppelin also meant less consistency in sales- substantially less. To some extent, the most commercially successful bands such as the Beatles hold onto people's interest by themselves adapting, and risking departure from their proven formulas. The picture of "safe consistent heavy sellers" given by the averaged list is far from the picture given by the cumulative career sales list. The discrepancy merits some attention, in a world now entirely dictated by the safe bet. The safe bet is a local maximum- the true peaks of sales and influence can more easily be reached by the adaptation of mature artists as they bring new influences into their art.
Chris Johnson
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page created Mon, Jun 11, 2001
last modified Mon, Jun 18, 2001
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Analysis
Studies, inquiries, speculation, research
INDEX
INDEX
Dynamics
Another Look At Dynamics Of Hit Records
EvergreenAlbumsAlphabetical.txt
107 K text file
EvergreenAlbumsSorted.txt
107 K text file
EvergreenArtistCareers.txt
17 K text file
EvergreenCareerAverages.txt
8 K text file
Evergreen Albums
Study of Long-Term Album Sales
Slew Rates
Additional Notes on Slew Rate for CDs
Vinyl Noise
Comparative measurements on LP noise floor
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