As far as overall unit sales go, I suggest the water is now so muddied as to render the concept meaningless.
Consider:
Up to the early 1980s music was retailed on LPs, singles, and cassettes for the most part, which were purchased from a dedicated record shop, or within a larger retail space like a supermarket or department store. Fairly easy to keep a running total of sales of this or that record, and just as easy to falsify those totals, either at the retail-outlet level or further up the corporate chain, and that's discounting the sales from independent shops, and I doubt department stores and supermarkets kept up to the minute checks on how many of a particular record they sold. Why would they? Their criteria is turnover. One assumes they simply wrote off those that were shoplifted. I know from experience how easy it was to nick records from certain shops...
Then along comes a brand new format at the start of the 1980s: CDs, so a lot of music fans make the format-switch over a period of time, and buy their favourite records all over again in the new format. And you also have to factor in those younger folks buying those albums for the first time anyway, never having bought them on vinyl. How do you differentiate from all the different retail outlets who is buying what? Another layer of guesstimation comes in to further skew the already skewed and wildly inaccurate sales figures.
Ten years later, remastering becomes a thing, so people buy their favourite albums again for a third time! Plus younger folks buying the album on CD may have bought the vinyl-master CD in the 1980s, or other folks are buying it for the first time...
You see how complex and incoherent this is all getting, and we haven't even reached the broadband era yet, with downloads across the board, and streaming from anywhere in the world, some of it unlicensed and illegal. No one is going to send in sales returns for them!
Then we get remixes, and more remastered editions to offset the overly-loud mastering of the earlier ones, and then vinyl makes a comeback, both with online retailers, but crucially on the high streets, and independent shops spring up catering for the upsurge in the old format. New albums start to become available in multiple formats and different editions.
What it comes down to is that sales figures, in any particular territory, region, nation, continent, for this or that album of the kind of vintage we're talking about here, half a century ago, are completely arbitrary and essentially meaningless, and mpossible to calculate in any viable way. There have been too many permutations, too many re-purchases, both by the same generation and by different generations over the last 50 years, for it to be possible to determine who sold what to who, how many times, in how many formats.
Of course, one could opt for a belief-based adjudication on it, and I've a hunch much of what free-marketeers rely on is consumer-faith-based.
It's not being asserted that something that has clearly sold shedloads of copies over the last 50 years is of less artistic 'value' than something more niche, though I'd certainly not hesitate in saying so about the flippin' Eagles, but that's just me. Maybe it's a North American thing to tie commercial performance with a qualitative view on artistic product, I dunno. Just saying....
Consider:
Up to the early 1980s music was retailed on LPs, singles, and cassettes for the most part, which were purchased from a dedicated record shop, or within a larger retail space like a supermarket or department store. Fairly easy to keep a running total of sales of this or that record, and just as easy to falsify those totals, either at the retail-outlet level or further up the corporate chain, and that's discounting the sales from independent shops, and I doubt department stores and supermarkets kept up to the minute checks on how many of a particular record they sold. Why would they? Their criteria is turnover. One assumes they simply wrote off those that were shoplifted. I know from experience how easy it was to nick records from certain shops...
Then along comes a brand new format at the start of the 1980s: CDs, so a lot of music fans make the format-switch over a period of time, and buy their favourite records all over again in the new format. And you also have to factor in those younger folks buying those albums for the first time anyway, never having bought them on vinyl. How do you differentiate from all the different retail outlets who is buying what? Another layer of guesstimation comes in to further skew the already skewed and wildly inaccurate sales figures.
Ten years later, remastering becomes a thing, so people buy their favourite albums again for a third time! Plus younger folks buying the album on CD may have bought the vinyl-master CD in the 1980s, or other folks are buying it for the first time...
You see how complex and incoherent this is all getting, and we haven't even reached the broadband era yet, with downloads across the board, and streaming from anywhere in the world, some of it unlicensed and illegal. No one is going to send in sales returns for them!
Then we get remixes, and more remastered editions to offset the overly-loud mastering of the earlier ones, and then vinyl makes a comeback, both with online retailers, but crucially on the high streets, and independent shops spring up catering for the upsurge in the old format. New albums start to become available in multiple formats and different editions.
What it comes down to is that sales figures, in any particular territory, region, nation, continent, for this or that album of the kind of vintage we're talking about here, half a century ago, are completely arbitrary and essentially meaningless, and mpossible to calculate in any viable way. There have been too many permutations, too many re-purchases, both by the same generation and by different generations over the last 50 years, for it to be possible to determine who sold what to who, how many times, in how many formats.
Of course, one could opt for a belief-based adjudication on it, and I've a hunch much of what free-marketeers rely on is consumer-faith-based.
It's not being asserted that something that has clearly sold shedloads of copies over the last 50 years is of less artistic 'value' than something more niche, though I'd certainly not hesitate in saying so about the flippin' Eagles, but that's just me. Maybe it's a North American thing to tie commercial performance with a qualitative view on artistic product, I dunno. Just saying....
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