It is two records! Quite literally. But seriously I don't see a problem with any double album counting as two sales. It is indeed two records a buyer is choosing to purchase, just happen to be packaged together as one artistic statement. Is selling 10,000 copies of a 4-Disc box set a greater achievement than selling 10,000 copies of 1 CD? I'd say it is. Yes that means every Double Album purchase is a x2 at the register and on he charts, but the converse is true as well...the higher cost to the customer of two LPs/CDs vs. just one, scares some buyers away from the increased price point.
That's correct...in some remote location, there are vast wharehouses full of Garth Brooks CDs, collecting dust.
I wonder if anyone has ever bought their own records to make a position on the charts for the publicity. Political organizations will buy books by politicians they support for this and also to funnel money to that politician.
From the Beatles Bible: "There were strong rumours that Brian Epstein bought 10,000 copies of [Love Me Do] to improve its chart ranking. While quite possibly true, these were never proven to be true."
BUT: As Lewisohn pointed out in Tune In, the UK charts were NOT formulated that way in 1962. Back then, stores only gave a ranking to their top-selling songs. So if Brian's NEMS store ordered 1 copy or 10,000 copies of "Love Me Do", the people compiling the charts would still only tally this up as 1 (one) point (or whatever the terminology was) since it was the top seller at NEMS. Thus, it didn't matter how many copies were actually bought and sold. What mattered was the number of stores that included a particular song on their chart-ranking form. Or something like that, as I don't have my book handy.
Well, and I think only copies ordered by and shipped to legitimate retailers get counted. So that means, like you implied, that someone like Garth Brooks can't go out and produce 10 million copies of each of his albums and let them sit in a warehouse while he collects Diamond Awards from the RIAA. So in a sense, the RIAA is loosely related to "sales" since retailers can't / won't order more copies of albums than they think they can sell. That said, if a retailer does order a million copies of an album that they end up not being able to sell (i.e. Walmart & Journey, or Best Buy & Chinese Democracy), that album still gets certified Platinum by the RIAA because those million copies were still ordered by, paid for by, and shipped to that retailer, even if 999,999 copies of the album sit on that retailer's shelves unsold for decades. So to your example, it's more accurate to say that the Beatles have shipped 183 million albums to retailers, rather than to say that they've sold 183 million albums.
There is a conspiracy theory that Taylor Swift's father bought up large amounts of her first album. She was just starting to enter the public eye, and only had one single out, Tim McGraw, which although successful, did not have a major impact and did not get her close to being a household name. Yet somehow, her debut album entered Billboard at number 19, selling a whopping 40,000 copies! It's practically unheard of for an artist to start at the top. The theory is that her father hoped to jump start her career, and that making such big debut on the charts would earn her lots of attention. For the following two years, they would continue to pull singles from the album, and garnered many more album sales in the process. Add in the fact that Swift was apparently frustrated with her previous label, keeping her in development rather than releasing her music, and it makes sense that she'd want to move things along a bit faster. She probably felt like she needed to catch up. Take away the initial sales, and the album takes on a more traditional and organic growth for a debut, including a peak in 2008, at which point she had 4 singles out, and had done a year and a half of major promotion/touring/appearances. But who knows, that boost from the big debut might have gotten her opportunities that she wouldn't have had otherwise.
If he was smart he'd buy those 10 million, give them away with concert tickets as long as the purchaser didn't explicitly tell him not to, and then sit back and enjoy the magazine covers and not-a-dates with Emma Stone.
Well if Swift's dad spent a few hundred grand on his daughter's first album, I'd say his "investment" paid off LOL.
Yeah yeah… harp on the Chris Gaines thing because that's the obvious low hanging fruit. But as huge fan of both Garth Brooks and the Beatles, I will just say that the Chris Gaines album is actually pretty good!
This is a thread on The Beatles? Taylor Swift and Garth Brooks don’t exactly measure up. Time for this topic to be put to bed, it seems. On to the next Beatles deluxe edition.
I actually took his comment as harping more on McCartney than Brooks... The Garth Brooks ball just happened to be in volley at the moment.
The White Album was just recently recertified by the RIAA at 24x Platinum. So that's what started the conversation. And there's already a conversation going about this year's AR50 release. See here: Abbey Road 50th Anniversary Discussion. What Can We Expect?
Yes I've checked and it's more or less that. The charts weren't compiled according to the number of records ordered but the number of records sold. If it was the biggest selling record in a particular store it was awarded 30 points (number thirty being awarded one point). The points accrued from numerous record outlets throughout the nation were totalised to establish the chart rankings. It's obvious that even if Epstein had managed in some way to magnify sales in his own shop, this wouldn't have been enough to get the record into the national charts.
I have no doubt that the White Album is one of the best-selling albums of all time, but I do think that, before SoundScan, music charts and certifications were heavily manipulated and not completely accurate.
