Why do I keep reading Garth Brooks is outselling The Beatles etc?

I think the totals includes singles, which neither Zep or Floyd sold many. The Stones did good on LPs & singles so they should be up there.

 

Heck, Mariah Carey waxed The Stones. Unbelievable.

 

If you read the Stones' album sales figures, they really did not sell that many albums compared to other artists. Most of the Stones albums that we hold so dear only sold 1 to 2 million copies. The hit albums by these artists we think of as lesser artists, sold in the 5 million and up range, sometimes significantly higher.

 

Well, he retired for 13 years. But since he's come back a year ago he topped Forbes' list of highest-paid country stars of the last 12 months with $90 million in revenue, nearly $80 million of which came from his latest tour. His 2014 comeback album, Man Against Machine, was certified Platinum by the RIAA in January for a million in sales (two months to get to that figure). And last year he launched GhostTunes, his own answer to iTunes selling not only his own music but that of other artists. I'd say he's still a very big star.

 

it was certified platinum but last i heard sales are less than 800k

 

Yeah, I guess the RIAA has added some calculation for official paid and ad supported streaming into its certification calculation.

 

well RIAA also does units shipped. there very well could be over 150k of them sitting on shelves in stores. think of how many are sitting around if every wal mart has just 4 copies sitting on a shelf and every best buy has 2

 

Could be. 800K in sales, whatever the number is in streams, is still a big number in this day an age. Hardly the number of an also-ran, which is my point. I mean it's like 8X the number of Mariah Carey's last album, 33% more than Nicki Minaj's last album, etc. It's not like he went away for 13 years, came back and no one cared. Quite the opposite, he's done better than most continually active artists.

 

We will likely never know the true list of biggest music sellers before the Sound Scan era. The labels had to play games with sales figures.

 

If one is trying to compare relative popularity of one recording artist versus another from 2 different eras, using number of records sold or dollars earned, you can't just make a flat comparison. You have to adjust for copies sold vs. national population at that time, and dollars earned vs. inflation. Same thing with popularity of movies.

If you wanna speculate who the most popular artist of all time might be, it's probably going to be someone like Bing Crosby...

 

I'm not entirely sure what this means, but it made I larf, anyway. Nice one!

 

Walmart can't return those discs, so they are SOLD even if they are never opened or put thru a cashier till.

 

I just came back from Wal Mart. There was no big pile of unsold Garth Brooks CDs there. Almost all of the CDs on display were country CDs.

 

Find me the 800,000 people who bought his recent cd.

I personally know five people who got together, rented a hotel room, and spent a whole lot on tickets for the Return of Garth, and none of them were even aware he had a new cd out.

Just saying.

 

Do you dismiss George Strait or Tom Petty for the same reason?

McCartney has played 4 out of the 5 biggest US festivals that are have very young demographics attending. it's not old people in lawn chair or young people wanting to hear stuff from his solo albums.

 

4 cd's isn't a big pile. i said if i had to guess music stores across the country have 150k or so copies on shelves

 

Not really when you add different demographics, the pop charts, a different promotional scale/slant and many, many videos.

 

I don´t think he sold all that many records here in Norway. His name is known by most people, but not really a "household name". Personally I have only ever heard one of his songs. "Friends in Low Places" sounds good to me, though I prefer older country songs.

 

He's basically unknown in Europe.

 

yeah but there are several huge artists in europe who are unknown in the states. take that/robbie williams being one of them

 

For sure.

 

oasis was also sorta looked at as a 90's band in the states and weren't very big here by the time they ended while they remained huge in europe

 

It takes a lot of stamina and dedication and luck for European bands to break the US.

 

I have found a slightly more updated list (published 2.5 years later):
http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/...rooks-music-sales-nielsen-soundscan/12482603/

I have indicated the sales increase over the span of 2.5 years in brackets:

1. Garth Brooks - 69.9 million (+1.3 m)
2. The Beatles - 65.8 million (+2.5 m)
3. Metallica - 54.42 million (+1.25 m)
4. Mariah Carey - 54.4 million (+0.8m)
5. Celine Dion - 52.2 million (+0.7m)

As you can see, the Beatles have averaged 1 million copies per year, almost doubling the amount of albums Brooks sells in a year. At that rate, I think it's inevitable the Beatles will overtake the title of #1 on the all-time Soundscan list. To be honest, I think it's pretty pathetic that a man whose career was at its peak during a time period when album sales started getting tracked has to resort himself to cheap box sets every few years just to maintain a slight lead over a group that stopped recording music 21 years before Soundscan began. I think that's a real testament to the success and popularity of the Beatles.

 

the beatles also have twice as many albums as him, have done several hits comps and boxset too. garth did a limited edition hits cd in the mid 90's that sold out. it was limited to 10 million