What happened to the big-selling movie soundtracks?

https://books.google.com/books?id=k...=onepage&q=fast times soundtrack flop&f=false

Per Risky Business: Rock In Film, written by Serge Denisoff and William Romanowski, the Fast Times Soundtrack failed to go gold.

 

Glad that something so trivial caused such an overreaction from you. Maybe we can get back to the thread topic, in general, as opposed to obsessing over how many copies of Fast Time were moved after 1991.

 

Forrest Gump OST is pretty good.

jerol

 

I pulled these #s off an article that is a few years old, so take them w a grain of salt:

Top Selling Soundtracks of "All Time":

1. The Bodyguard (16 million).
2. Purple Rain (13 million)
3. Saturday Night Fever (11 million)
4. Dirty Dancing (11 million)
5. The Lion King (10 million)
6. Grease (8 million)
7. Footloose (8 million)
8. Titanic (8 million)
9. Top Gun (7 million)
10. Waiting to Exhale (7 million)

I own exactly none of these on CD, which is half surprising. I did have a copy of Saturday Night Fever on vinyl for a long time though, and may even still have a copy on the shelf, but I'm not positive.

 

I'm not into soundtracks very much, but seem to remember that they were better in the 80's. Most of the time a collection of greatest hits or greatest hits to-be, because someone went through the trouble of actually get radio play for the new music on the soundtrack.

But typing this, I realise I bought a couple of soundtrack CD's in the past months. Miami Vice because I finally wanted to own it anyway. Against All Odds because it contains a track by Peter Gabriel not available anywhere else (that I know of). The Blues Brothers (1st one), finally. Blade Runner due to the fantastic remaster in Audio Fidelity. Solaris because it was partly made with a Crystal Bachet.

For someone not into soundtracks, that's actually a lot of soundtrack. ;-)

 

I have Purple Rain since its release, great album. I came across a cheap MFSL disc of Saturday Night Fever about a year and a half ago and couldn't resist it. Great album too, although you need to like disco. I once had Grease on vinyl, never rebought it on CD. I do still like the music and can still sing most of the songs, though. So it's somewhere way down on my rebuy list. I liked Footloose and Top Gun and had them on cassette for a while, but don't feel the urge to rebuy.

 

The Frozen ST was #1 for 14 weeks last year and sold 4M+ in the US and 8M+ WW. Thats HUGE these days.

The best selling ST album is the Bodyguard however, I reckon it was the biggest selling album everywhere on earth back in '93, while IWALY was the biggest song everywhere on earth that same year. Im guessing Whitney was the happiest woman on earth that year as well, as she became a mommy too lol.

 

Those are just US sales. The Bodyguard has sold 45M+ WW. Titanic and SNF have sold 30M+ WW.

 

For some reason the Grease soundtrack's sales haven't been updated in 20 years. The movie was re-released in cinemas in 1998 and must have shifted some copies off the back of that. Even before '98, it was listed as selling 8 million.

 

Whitney's version of I Will Always Love You totally sold that soundtrack. And probably the movie too.

 

as per Wiki:
It is the second best-selling album ever released and top-selling soundtrack in history with 44.7 million copies sold worldwide.[3]

The New Yorker article referenced for the number seems to have gone offline though...

For US only they indicate:

The album has sold over 6 million copies in the US in the SoundScan era (beginning 1991) in addition to the 8 million shipped in the years 1978-1984.

 

Yeah, that sounds more like it.

 

In 2015, a consumer hears a song they like in movie, they download it for $1.29. The era of the soundtrack is over because they are no longer necessary, and music retail now offers other options.

 

I recall the soundtrack to "Valley Girl" being very popular at one time.

 

I have seen some soundtracks where the one or two desirable songs are locked down as 'album only' to combat this. Not sure if that sort of thing stimulates more sales or piracy though.

 

I am trying to remember what the last soundtrack I bought was.

Probably the remastered Ghostbusters with bonus tracks.

 

Translation: "rather than admit I had flawed information, I'll insult the other person, even though all the other person did in the first place was ask where I got that information"...

 

Sales of Fifty Shades of Grey aren't doing bad.. for a soundtrack in the current situation of the industry. Same I can say of Guardians of the Galaxy.

Another soundtrack that sold really well was Searching for Sugar Man and The Fault in our Stars (on a lesser scale, but overall good-selling).

 

Some of my fave soundtracks:
Firestarter, Sorcerer, Unbreakable, The Insider, Siesta, Heat, Gladiator, Birdy, The Last Temptation of Christ, Suspiria
I don't really go for the collections of pop tunes excerpted in the movie soundtracks. Yost mentioned Blade Runner. There's one that I need to pick up.

 

Translation: "Boom, I just sunk your battleship"....lol...

 

If you're going to dish, you're going to have to take. Besides, It wasn't flawed information. It was a presumption, which other people believed also. (To borrow your expression, translation: it wasn't important enough to research. Already told you before that no prior research was conducted. That didn't satisfy you.) Look, it doesn't matter to me if it sold 400,000 copies or 4 million. If I was wrong, so what? What do you want? A dollar?

If you're going to get defensive and assign blame, then, by the same token, how about a *little* credit then? (Y'know, the original thread topic, which the captain of the debate team didn't like/agree with/approve of, and started that completely unnecessary side argument):

See that. No "Twighlight." Nothing after the late '90's. Of course, since you always seem to want to be argumentative, you'll instead find fault in that I neglected to mention "Purple Rain" and "The Lion King" in previous posts.

 

Yes!

 

I blame the decline of soundtracks on the decrease of importance of music in our culture in favor of the visual. In other words, music just isn't *that* important to a lot of people anymore. I'm meeting more and more people who aren't much interested in music.

 

The proliferation of media and the rise of iTunes is certainly a big factor, but I think there's a few other factors at play -- if you think about the movie industry, in the 70s and 80s movies were an event.

Before VHS players were affordable ('85? '86?), you either saw them in the theater or you missed them. I only remember a few films that were re-released in the theater (Star Wars back in like '82 comes to mind, but I'm sure others can add to that list.) Soundtracks were cultural touchstones for those who had seen the movie, and a more inexpensive way to re-experience the picture. (Hearing 'Danger Zone' is a quick way for your minds eye to be wowed by F-14s taking off from aircraft carriers and zoom around).

The other factor that comes to mind is that artists were contributing songs uniquely for the movies -- I think of Huey Lewis' songs in Back to the Future, Ray Parker Jr.'s Ghostbusters, Cyndi Lauper's Goonies' title and of course all the great Kenny Loggins songs, all of which dominated the radio in my Coloradoan, music-awakening youth. The music video also added to this, considering they would splice scenes from the movies into the video, again, one of the few ways to inexpensively relive some of the best scenes.

Finally, younger kids won't remember this, but it took forever between the time a movie appeared in the theater and was released for VHS. And, VHS tapes cost $60-$80 each for awhile, meaning seeing the movie multiple times was a different proposition.

 

O Brother, Where Art Thou? - This was released right at the peak of CD sales.