Soundscan Surprises, Week Ending 8/18
Back-catalog sales numbers of note from Nielsen SoundScan.
The definition of “back catalog” is: “at least 18 months old, have fallen below №100 on the Billboard 200 and do not have an active single on our radio.”
Per special request from reader pop style, this week’s list is a little different:
Are you able to post the totals of the albums? It’d be interesting to see the overall standing!
I painstakingly copied and pasted a lot of numbers into a spreadsheet and then sorted them so I could see the ranking of records by lifetime sales rather than just however many they sold last week. “Don’t you have interns for that,” you may ask? To which I would reply, “Aha, but my dream job is to be an intern, I love minutiae—so I let my interns do real work reporting stories instead. Just across from me Rebecca McCarthy is hard at work!”)
It’s pretty interesting, as a snapshot for comparison, and the results are actually sort of surprising? I guess I expected more country in the top ten, given how many country albums are on this chart every week, but maybe we’re just in a country moment. And I didn’t know about Eminem’s fans? Surprised too that Prince hasn’t cracked the top ten; he’s got FIVE different albums on the back catalog right now, but even added up their joint lifetime sales are only 7,874,676 copies.
I’ve preserved the original “ranking” by weekly sales on the top 200, and also added the original release date for context. All together, it gives you a good idea of volume of sales over time, and the rate of change of popularity of different types of music over time. Here are the top ten lifetime sales numbers of last week’s top 200 on the back catalog:
16,386,849 copies release to date (August 12, 1991)
3. METALLICA METALLICA 5,239 copies last week
12,745,799 copies release to date (November 13, 2000)
52. BEATLES BEATLES 1 1,725 copies last week
12,043,000 copies release to date (May 18, 1984)
13. MARLEY*BOB & THE WAILERS LEGEND 2,856 copies last week
11,696,922 copies release to date (January 24, 2011)
5. ADELE 21 4,100 copies last week
11,019,521 copies release to date (May 23, 2000)
57. EMINEM MARSHALL MATHERS LP 1,650 copies last week
10,699,621 copies release to date (May 21, 2002)
9. EMINEM EMINEM SHOW 3,047 copies last week
10,402,820 copies release to date (October 24, 2000)
145. LINKIN PARK HYBRID THEORY 1,126 copies last week
10,308,661 copies release to date (March 23, 2004)
165. USHER CONFESSIONS 1,069 copies last week
10,253,733 copies release to date (August 27, 1991)
166.PEARL JAM TEN 1,065 copies last week
9,568,583 copies release to date (October 25, 1994)
21. SEGER*BOB GREATEST HITS 2,508
(Previously.)