Impressive work just released today including all the known data for their albums, songs and DVD's released since 1963, 64 pages of amazing stuff including digital and streaming figures too.

CSPC: The Rolling Stones Popularity Analysis

How many things will change in your life within’ a 52 years span? An awful lot for sure. Even if you keep the same job all along, you will be retired before doing it for so long. Some things last that much though. The Eiffel Tower is still in Paris. Soccer is still the most popular sport. European unions are still alive. The Rolling Stones are still releasing new albums.

Well, new, not completely. Blue & Lonesome is the first full album of covers from the cult band. It comes out more than a decade after their last record, A Bigger Bang in 2005.

In 1964, their first album was a massive smash with 12 weeks at #1 and 36 weeks Top 3 in the UK. Starting so strongly makes it harder to last but the success never really left Mick Jagger band. As successful as the road has been that doesn’t mean it was all pretty. Over their curse, the group knew more than 25 members, had various legal issues and even faced the death of their original founder in 1969, Brian Jones. The cult pair Mick Jagger–Keith Richards proved to be incredibly consistent though, keeping the boat up and running.

Often presented as the main competitors of the Beatles, it is clear that ultimately the Liverpool band ended up as the winner as they are the most popular music act of all-time. With no mega-selling album in their discography, some may question the legitimacy of the Rolling Stones among the elite group of biggest acts ever. We do know how much Medias love to use hyperboles, often inflating real achievements of music stars. It is now time to sort out what’s true and what isn’t over the extensive CSPC study that you are reading right now.

As a reminder for users who are not yet familiar with the CSPC idea you do not need to worry, it is quite simple as it only consists in merging every format sales an artist has been getting and attributing them to respective studio albums. We will start by focusing on raw data, setting how much each Rolling Stones album sold. Then, we will check sales of each track from those albums on each format – physical, digital and streaming – and weight them to value those figures on a par with album sales. To complete the study, we will study sales of all compilations, live albums and music videos they dropped. Once all the raw data is set, we will only need to apply appropriate weighting to get the overall picture of those rock legends career results.

Let’s go!

[chartmasters.org]

Interesting and impressive data.

I'd be curious to see the results with The Beatles factored in..
Will check back on it.

Wonderful material; some very intriguing numbers - the Stones really sold impressive numbers in the 90s. Voodoo, Bridges and Stripped combined is almost 16 million albums; quite incredible for a band then 30+ years into it.

The most striking conclusion though is the overall value of that catalog. Up to an unbelievable 234,8 million total equivalent album sales, the Rolling Stones position among the all-time greats of the music industry is legitimate as it can be.

Among all artists studied so far, only Madonna performed better. The gap of 9 million between both artists isn’t even impossible to fill though especially as the rock band ongoing catalog appeal is much bigger. Their new album Blue & Lonesome will try to add its share of sales as well to catch the original diva. Without that extra help, the Rolling Stones total is already some 40-ish million ahead of acts as massive as Led Zeppelin, U2 or Celine Dion.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2016-12-05 17:53 by 1962.

i never understand why the likes of madonna or celine dion can sell the same or more than the stones.

it does not make sense.