How many copies did "Stoned Love" sell by the Supremes in 1971

[franjoy56]

Stoned Love was the biggest 70's Supremes hit and on the charts 12 weeks, why is it that it only reached number 7, it outlasted "My World Is Empty" "Nothing But Heartaches
"Reflections" "Stop in the Name Of Love" and nearly every other suprmes single
except wdolg, bl and csam, sdwbt and lc these songs were on the charts for 12 13 and 15 weeks, and stoned love was on the chart as long as baby love. Love Child and Someday well be together were huge hits on the charts for 15 weeks, what songs prevented stoned love for moving higher up the charts, thankfully it reached nmbr #1 r&b and #3 in the UK charts. HOW MANY COPIES DID STONED lOVE SELL IF ANYONE KNOWS.

[jobeterob]

In one of the Hitsville USA volumes, I believe it says Stoned Love sold 3 million copies; it may not have got quite as much play on AM Radio due to the title of the song and that might have kept it a little lower on the charts. Clearly, it was the 70's Supremes biggest hit.

Many 60's hits did not chart as long as songs issued in other decades; the 60's were years of 3 or 4 singles being issued a year and they flew up and down the charts quickly whereas in the 90's, there were a lot fewer singles being issued and they lasted forever on the charts.

[jillfoster]

Yes... it was about 3 million. The reason it was not number one is just that it was a slower, steadier seller over a longer period. Some songs are like that. For instance, Lulu's "Oh Me Oh My" was on the charts for 14 weeks, 2 weeks longer than Stoned Love, and it only went to number 22. "To Sir, With Love" was on the charts 17 weeks, but spent 6 weeks at number one.

[florence]

In one of the Hitsville USA volumes, I believe it says Stoned Love sold 3 million copies; it may not have got quite as much play on AM Radio due to the title of the song and that might have kept it a little lower on the charts. Clearly, it was the 70's Supremes biggest hit.

Airplay doesn't seem to have hindered it that much as it "only" made #5 on Cashbox whose chart was sales based only.

I wonder is that 3m sales figure worldwide or US only?

It sold around 330k in the UK.

[Bokiluis]

I recall that it was a little over 1 million in the states and since it did so well internationally, 3 million worldwide cume sounds about right. I would stay away from anything listed in the sexy one's tragic tomes. However, I am a bit of a numbers junkie, loving charts and sales info. I think 3 million doesn't sound unrealistic.

[marv2]

In one of the Hitsville USA volumes, I believe it says Stoned Love sold 3 million copies; it may not have got quite as much play on AM Radio due to the title of the song and that might have kept it a little lower on the charts. Clearly, it was the 70's Supremes biggest hit.

Many 60's hits did not chart as long as songs issued in other decades; the 60's were years of 3 or 4 singles being issued a year and they flew up and down the charts quickly whereas in the 90's, there were a lot fewer singles being issued and they lasted forever on the charts.


Are you kidding me? "Stoned Love" got plenty of radio airplay AM and FM. But in regards to AM, it got played plenty on Top 40 AM and Soul AM stations. Where were you living in 1970-71? I ask because even Canadian AM stations like CKLW out of Windsor and CHUM out of Toronto played "Stoned Love" regularly. I remember the discussion we were having back in the Summer where you [[or someone) claimed that most people do not remember this record or thought it was a Diana Ross song LOL! I know that is impossible as much as it was played during it's original release in late 1970.

I will have to do a little research to come up with the songs that were also very popular at that time which may have prevented "Stoned Love" from going #1 Pop. It went #1 Soul/R&B in December 1970.

[marv2]

"Stoned Love" sold 3 million originally. I wonder how many copies it's sold overall or cumulative total is?

[marv2]

Here's a comment on the song "Stoned Love" made just 9 hours ago on Youtube on my channel:

"Stoned Love" is the ultimate anthem to the sixties [[love) generation. I am afraid this great song coincided with the "high water mark" of our nation that has been in steady social and economic decline since the golden days of Motown. NBoshard

[johnjeb]

Are you kidding me? "Stoned Love" got plenty of radio airplay AM and FM. But in regards to AM, it got played plenty on Top 40 AM and Soul AM stations. Where were you living in 1970-71? I ask because even Canadian AM stations like CKLW out of Windsor and CHUM out of Toronto played "Stoned Love" regularly. I remember the discussion we were having back in the Summer where you [[or someone) claimed that most people do not remember this record or thought it was a Diana Ross song LOL! I know that is impossible as much as it was played during it's original release in late 1970.

I will have to do a little research to come up with the songs that were also very popular at that time which may have prevented "Stoned Love" from going #1 Pop. It went #1 Soul/R&B in December 1970.

Many people confused The 70s Supremes with Diana Ross in 1970/1971, Ladder, Mountain, and Stoned Love, in particular. Many times I've heard oldies station DJs refer to the 70s Supremes as Diana Ross and The Supremes and to Diana Ross solo recordings as Diana Ross and The Supremes. sigh At least they play the music.

When Diana Ross was giving a radio interview in 1998 the host of that talk show told her his favorite Supremes song was "Stoned Love". She informed him that she didn't sing on that song and he responded that it says in his notes "by The Supremes". She corrected him by saying that song was done by her replacement "Scherrie Terrell"!!!! lol You could tell she knew she got the name wrong but couldn't remember Jean's name. Anyway he is almost my age so he may have been either almost out of high school or just into his early college years when that song was popular.

I quickly scanned my Billboard chart books and saw that Motown had about 10 songs in the Hot 100 during that period, half in the Top 20. When "Stoned Love" was on the charts, "River Deep Mountain High" also entered the charts. As "Stoned Love" was dropping off "Remember Me" entered the charts.

[marv2]

Many people confused The 70s Supremes with Diana Ross in 1970/1971, Ladder, Mountain, and Stoned Love, in particular. Many times I've heard oldies station DJs refer to the 70s Supremes as Diana Ross and The Supremes and to Diana Ross solo recordings as Diana Ross and The Supremes. sigh At least they play the music.

When Diana Ross was giving a radio interview in 1998 the host of that talk show told her his favorite Supremes song was "Stoned Love". She informed him that she didn't sing on that song and he responded that it says in his notes "by The Supremes". She corrected him by saying that song was done by her replacement "Scherrie Terrell"!!!! lol You could tell she knew she got the name wrong but couldn't remember Jean's name. Anyway he is almost my age so he may have been either almost out of high school or just into his early college years when that song was popular.

I quickly scanned my Billboard chart books and saw that Motown had about 10 songs in the Hot 100 during that period, half in the Top 20. When "Stoned Love" was on the charts, "River Deep Mountain High" also entered the charts. As "Stoned Love" was dropping off "Remember Me" entered the charts.

johnjeb, with all due respect I was referring to people and DJ's at the time, in the early 70's not confusing the two. There wasn't anyone that I knew or around me that thought Diana Ross was still in the Supremes because of all the publicity surrounding her departure the year before. The announcement of Jean Terrell replacing her had also received a lot of publicity and by the time "Stoned Love" was released they had did various nationally televised appearances on the most popular TV shows at that time.

Oldies DJ's today are not that educated about the music or the artist that they are directed to play by corporations that own most of the commercial stations unfortunately. Some of these people weren't even born when many of the records they played were hits. To be, blunt some are just lazy, some are just dumb and some just look at it as a job.

I view the few that make these types of mistakes as being no different from those that lump all Soul music made by black artists in with "Motown".

[Jimi LaLumia]

and Motown was not giving The Supremes records the same push as when Ross was lead;
we all know Gordy was all about Ross, he wasn't personally invested in any of the other artists,and the fact that another single wasn't released from that album following on the heels of a million seller tells me all I need to know..that album being "New Ways.." which would have sold more if there had been more than one single release..
who ever heard of a non-theme oriented [[like Sam Cooke or Livepool,etc) Supremes album that only had one single release, especially after the first one was a huge hit?

[jobeterob]

If the radio play had been greater, it would have reached #1 pop.

[Jimi LaLumia]

and the label leans on radio for more airplay...
do you REALLY think that Motown was leaning on radio to play the 'new' Supremes?...I don't..
I think Motown felt that Supremes airplay was taking away from solo Ross airplay[[it probably was),and Ross was struggling for hits[[with the exception of "Ain't No Mountain..")during 1970/1971 into 72..
who do you think the priority was?
and don't you think that Jean Terrell eventually figured this out,or someone figured it out for her?

[johnjeb]

johnjeb, with all due respect I was referring to people and DJ's at the time, in the early 70's not confusing the two. There wasn't anyone that I knew or around me that thought Diana Ross was still in the Supremes because of all the publicity surrounding her departure the year before. The announcement of Jean Terrell replacing her had also received a lot of publicity and by the time "Stoned Love" was released they had did various nationally televised appearances on the most popular TV shows at that time.

Oldies DJ's today are not that educated about the music or the artist that they are directed to play by corporations that own most of the commercial stations unfortunately. Some of these people weren't even born when many of the records they played were hits. To be, blunt some are just lazy, some are just dumb and some just look at it as a job.

I view the few that make these types of mistakes as being no different from those that lump all Soul music made by black artists in with "Motown".

marv2, the talk-show host I was referring to is now in his late 50s and was an older teenager at the time Stoned Love was on the radio and he still thought it was Diana Ross and The Supremes.

We come from different backgrounds and have differnt experiences. There were people around me that knew nothing about Diana Ross leaving the Supremes. The publicity in my suburban community or my rural college community [[although with 20,000 students) was minimal regarding her departure from the group. Virtually no one was talking about it.

I was a senior in college at the time and had little access to television or radio, which was not unusual for college students. Keeping up to date on pop culture back then was not as easy as it is today - you had to search it out. Most college students where I attended were interested in rock music, much to my disappointment.

[jillfoster]

Rob, Marv is right. He was talking solely about radio back in the time of original release. I know my brother and sister didn't mistake ANY Supremes record for a Diana ross record. Now, they might have mistaken a Supremes record for a Brenda And the Tabulations record... but my brother and sister bought "Up the Ladder To the Roof" because they loved the song, and both of them can't stand Diana's voice, and never bought a Supremes song before that [[they felt she sounded whiny). They also named our cat Nathan Jones, LOL! [[and Johnjeb, we live on a farm 10 miles from the nearest gas station)On air radio personalities of today are a total JOKE. Most just jump from station to station, genre to genre, even going from music to talk radio.... not doing any of them in a knowledgeable and preofessional manner. They are basically there just to push the buttons and keep the music going. the entire radio industry, with it's corporate monopolies and homogenized programming has gone straight to hell.

[Jimi LaLumia]

I agree, the average person is casual when it comes to pop music, and Motown did nothing to reach them with the news..people sitting in their living room when Sullivan said Ross was leaving the group, do you think the average person sitting on the couch was hanging on Ed's every word?..I was, but even then, I knew most people weren't; there wasn't a TV special celebrating this event [[and "Farewell" SHOULD have been on tv, but there was very little attention paid, and the "Farewell" album, as I recall, DIDN'T sell)..
the average yokel had been brainwashed with the name "Diana Ross & The Supremes" since 1967, so, by 1970,anything Supremes to the average yokel would always be attached to Ross, unless a huge campaign took place, and it didn't..
I don't remember Ross or Terrell being trotted up to NY Top 40 radio to announce/discuss the change, nocover photos on magazines like "Life" Or "Look" or any mainstream media, or even Rolling Stone, etc paying attention..
Motown DID NOT push this event, not to the mainstream public, not really,, they didn't

[roger]

I think that Motown were genuinely surprised by the lack of success that DIANA ROSS's first solo effort "Reach Out And Touch" had compared with the first SUPREMES effort without her "Up the Ladder To The roof".

These are the respective chart positions .. Billboard for the US .. Guinness Book Of Hit records for the UK

"Up The Ladder To The Roof"
US "Pop" : 11 weeks, peaking at #10
US R&B : 13 weeks, peaking at #5
UK : 15 weeks, peaking at #6

"Reach Out And Touch"
US "Pop" : 9 weeks, peaking at #20
US R&B : 9 weeks, peaking at #7
UK : 5 weeks, peaking at #33

I think people at Motown were genuinely concerned that Diana's solo career was going to stall.

Indeed, those who have the 1970 volume of "The Complete Motown Singles" should check out the last track on Disc 52 which is a special disc sent out to Motown's distributors by Barney Ales complaining about the "underperformance" of "Reach Out And Touch", stating that everybody knew it was "a number one record" and implying that they weren't doing their job properly.

On this basis I can see that there may have been confusion amongst the record buying public about who was actually in the group. I had no such confusion, being a 16 year old Motown obsessive living in Sheffield, England, but then, when I think about it, being on a tight budget, I bought "Up The ladder To The Roof" at full price immediately upon release. It was only after a few months had gone by that a copy of "Reach Out And Touch" entered the collection [[a cheap ex-juke-box copy as I recall).

Roger

[captainjames]

Roger,
I do remember the confusion over "Up The Ladder To the Roof". DJ's constantly said it was Diana Ross and The Supremes.


I think that Motown were genuinely surprised by the lack of success that DIANA ROSS's first solo effort "Reach Out And Touch" had compared with the first SUPREMES effort without her "Up the Ladder To The roof".

These are the respective chart positions .. Billboard for the US .. Guinness Book Of Hit records for the UK

"Up The Ladder To The Roof"
US "Pop" : 11 weeks, peaking at #10
US R&B : 13 weeks, peaking at #5
UK : 15 weeks, peaking at #6

"Reach Out And Touch"
US "Pop" : 9 weeks, peaking at #20
US R&B : 9 weeks, peaking at #7
UK : 5 weeks, peaking at #33

I think people at Motown were genuinely concerned that Diana's solo career was going to stall.

Indeed, those who have the 1970 volume of "The Complete Motown Singles" should check out the last track on Disc 52 which is a special disc sent out to Motown's distributors by Barney Ales complaining about the "underperformance" of "Reach Out And Touch", stating that everybody knew it was "a number one record" and implying that they weren't doing their job properly.

On this basis I can see that there may have been confusion amongst the record buying public about who was actually in the group. I had no such confusion, being a 16 year old Motown obsessive living in Sheffield, England, but then, when I think about it, being on a tight budget, I bought "Up The ladder To The Roof" at full price immediately upon release. It was only after a few months had gone by that a copy of "Reach Out And Touch" entered the collection [[a cheap ex-juke-box copy as I recall).

Roger

[Jimi LaLumia]

was there a PLAN B to return Ross to the group if the solo thing did, indeed stall? could that be why the new group/new singer was downplayed to the casual mainstream audience who STILL don't know that any changes were ever made?

[captainjames]

Naw, Diana Ross was gonna make it as long as she had Berry Gordy. Folks talk about her singles and LP records being not sucessful but honestly, I think Mr. Gordy had his mind set on movies from the beginning. He was set on making Diana Ross a movie star hit record or no hit record.

[Jimi LaLumia]

as a Ross fan, I was upset by the early solo results, especially compared to the UK, where tracks like "I'm Still Waiting" had zoomed to the top..I also remained a Supremes fan, and by late 1970, even to an 18 year old like me, things seemed to be a bit fuzzy regarding Ross and the Supremes

[captainjames]

I think "Reach Out and Touch" may have stalled originally but eventually became a million seller.

[Jimi LaLumia]

to this day, it's still invisible at 'oldies/classic hits' radio, at least in New York it is

[captainjames]

I find it on the Religion and Gospel hits.

[Jimi LaLumia]

yikes...a million you say?..that record didn't have a prayer as I recall..oh well..

[captainjames]

I am going on memory but, "Reach Out and Touch" soared to number 20 on Billboard, stalled and then sank. However it went to # 2 on Cashbox at the time. Diana Ross has said herself that the song did not do well at first but has over a period of time.

[roger]

as a Ross fan, I was upset by the early solo results, especially compared to the UK, where tracks like "I'm Still Waiting" had zoomed to the top..I also remained a Supremes fan, and by late 1970, even to an 18 year old like me, things seemed to be a bit fuzzy regarding Ross and the Supremes

Jimi .. the runaway UK success of "I'm Still Waiting" [[4 weeks at #1 and 14 weeks on the charts) was almost entirely down to BBC Radio One DJ TONY BLACKBURN. He was [[and still is) a Motown fanatic and he played it as an LP track on his Breakfast Radio show and pressed it for it to become a single.

At the time the Tony Blackburn show on Radio One was easily the most listened to Pop Music show on British Radio [[the fact that BBC Radio one was about the only station in Britain at the time where you could hear "pop" music being played during the day obviously helped). He made it his "Record of The Week" and the great British public went along with him.

Roger

[Strange]

"Stoned Love" sold 3 million originally. I wonder how many copies it's sold overall or cumulative total is?

To believe that sale I reckon you'd need to be 'stoned' yourself Marv2! You've just made it about the biggest selling single of the decade...

[Jimi LaLumia]

with Motown's book keeping and avoidence of the RIAA tabulations, who's to say?..the record certainly deserved to be the biggest selling single of the decade..and unlike rock/pop hits, Motown hits sold big numbers to both white and black record buyers..I doubt we'll ever know, but SOMETHING helped pay for all of Mr. Gordy's 'castles', mansions, etc

[jobeterob]

Jimi is pretty close to the truth..........the website Florence once provided is no more close to the truth than the RIAA, Marv's guesses, my guesses, Mary Wilson's figures, Randy Tarraborelli's figures, the remnants of Motown's figures, or Soundscan's figures. They were all subject to manipulation and did get manipulated.

The most valuable kind of information is stuff that came out of Roshkind or someone who was quoted in The Ross/Sups/Tempts expanded duets saying that TCB got the higher chart numbers but they saw the sales figures rolling in day after day and Ross & the Sups Join the Tempts had the bigger sales figures.

Randy T. once said something like Diana Ross got a statement saying It's My Turn sold 430,000 copies and was in the Top 10 and she thought Berry was lieing to her and it helped her decide to leave Motown; it would be much more valuable to have Diana Ross tell you that face to face than have some unnamed person tell that to Randy who repeats it to us. Basically, that kind of evidence is unreliable and won't even be allowed in Court; but it's the kind of gossip the world turns on now.

We can make all the suppositions in the world that we want about Stoned Love or Reach Out and Touch or any other song, but we don't really know. Mary Brewster should ask Mary Wilson some time and see what kind of response she gets about Stoned Love.

[Jimi LaLumia]

and we'll never know; I'm sure that a certain Mr.Gordy is banking on that fact; in more ways than one...lol

[Roberta75]

and we'll never know; I'm sure that a certain Mr.Gordy is banking on that fact; in more ways than one...lol

You seem to have some major issues with Mr. Berry Gordy. Would I be wrong in surmising that I suspect a bit of jealousy on your part?

Roberta

[kenneth]

You seem to have some major issues with Mr. Berry Gordy. Would I be wrong in surmising that I suspect a bit of jealousy on your part?

Roberta

Roberta75, Now you know it isn't jealousy, but you've just allowed Jimi to unleash his conspiracy theories on us again! Jimi, I love you, but please not again!!! Kenneth

[Jimi LaLumia]

Yes, I am soooooooooooooooo jealous of Mr. Gordy...lol..
I love Mr. Gordy on one level, he gave me MOTOWN to enjoy for my entire life..
I don't love his treatment of many of my favorite artists,or his 'book keeping"
and WTF are you, his great aunt, running out with a rolling pin to rescue your lil Berry?...lol

[Roberta75]

No I'm not his great aunt but his book keeping or treatment of artists is between Mr. Gordy and the people who were fortunate enough to be signed to his label. It's really none of your business.

[Roberta75]

Roberta75, Now you know it isn't jealousy, but you've just allowed Jimi to unleash his conspiracy theories on us again! Jimi, I love you, but please not again!!! Kenneth

His Berry Gordy/Motown conspiracy theories are almost as ridiculous as the Birthers against President Obama and the people who think 9/11 was an inside job.

Roberta

[Jimi LaLumia]

People who become public figures/stars/brand names become everyone's business, that's part of the 'burden of stardom" that Miss Ross talked about;
tell the Enquirer and STAR Magazine that what they write about/report on is none of their business..good luck with that...

when you willingly thrust yourself into the entertainment biz, you become everyone's business..get over it..

[mowest]

One correction: "Reach Out And Touch [[Somebody's Hand)" got to #10 on the Cash Box pop chart. Its run was 9 weeks.

[kenneth]

His Berry Gordy/Motown conspiracy theories are almost as ridiculous as the Birthers against President Obama and the people who think 9/11 was an inside job.

Roberta

Well, now I wouldn't go that far! You gotta love him, he's passionate about what he believes in!

Hey Jimi, read my thread about the "Dianna" Ross Live CD I found lately...want to know if you can id it.

[luke]

Very true Jim and remember some people dont want some people talked about and do want others talked about. Sooooo transparent! lol I thought Stoned Love made it to #1 R and B hence being included on the #1s--? Didnt Berry say "I wash my hands of the group" so its not conspiracy theory its the truth! Reach out and Touch IMO was one of the worst things ever put out by Diana. Did Berry or Diana insist it be put out first?

[Roberta75]

Very true Jim and remember some people dont want some people talked about and do want others talked about. Sooooo transparent! lol I thought Stoned Love made it to #1 R and B hence being included on the #1s--? Didnt Berry say "I wash my hands of the group" so its not conspiracy theory its the truth! Reach out and Touch IMO was one of the worst things ever put out by Diana. Did Berry or Diana insist it be put out first?

Not nearly as transparent as you Miss Looky. LOL

[Jimi LaLumia]

we still luv you Roberta VO5!

[captainjames]

Not sure about the final sales of Stone Love but if you want to know if Reach And Touch was a big hit just ask Valerie Simpson. Val would have been the one to see the final royalties from this song.

[Roberta75]

we still luv you Roberta VO5!

Thank you hon.

[jillfoster]

Very true Jim and remember some people dont want some people talked about and do want others talked about. Sooooo transparent! lol I thought Stoned Love made it to #1 R and B hence being included on the #1s--? Didnt Berry say "I wash my hands of the group" so its not conspiracy theory its the truth! Reach out and Touch IMO was one of the worst things ever put out by Diana. Did Berry or Diana insist it be put out first?

I also agree that the song sucked. I LOVE "Remember Me" and would have used that as the first single.

[luke]

Me too Jill-loved Remember Me-Diana at her best too!

[marv2]

If the radio play had been greater, it would have reached #1 pop.


Come on Jobeterob, you're a smart guy, how do you think they sold 3 million copies of "Stoned Love" without some pretty major radio airplay? It has been concluded that Motown was no longer pulling out all the stops to promote the Supemes and their releases by this time, so it had to have been the DJ's playing it and the public requesting in order to sell in those numbers. I was around back then so I know it received a lot airplay.

[marv2]

To believe that sale I reckon you'd need to be 'stoned' yourself Marv2! You've just made it about the biggest selling single of the decade...]

Not true "Strange". I am not stoned, thanks. When I get back from Thanksgiving holiday [[and if I remember LOL), I'll reseach it for you and then can more readily accept what I just told you. Geez! LOL!!!

[marv2]

marv2, the talk-show host I was referring to is now in his late 50s and was an older teenager at the time Stoned Love was on the radio and he still thought it was Diana Ross and The Supremes.

We come from different backgrounds and have differnt experiences. There were people around me that knew nothing about Diana Ross leaving the Supremes. The publicity in my suburban community or my rural college community [[although with 20,000 students) was minimal regarding her departure from the group. Virtually no one was talking about it.

I was a senior in college at the time and had little access to television or radio, which was not unusual for college students. Keeping up to date on pop culture back then was not as easy as it is today - you had to search it out. Most college students where I attended were interested in rock music, much to my disappointment.

johnjeb, I believe you when you say that this talk show host just didn't know. I just have to ask why? I mean it was hardly a secret and he was after all in the entertainment industry. One point you made may hold the answer ,the part about different backgrounds & cultures. In the African American community everyone knew that it was the"New Supremes" with Jean Terrell on lead. It was a no-brainer. The point you made does leave more room for the possibility of some just not knowing or even caring. I am now thinking of what the possible response I would have gotten if I had asked my Grandma to name the members of the Rolling Stones or Beatles.

Marv

[marv2]

and the label leans on radio for more airplay...
do you REALLY think that Motown was leaning on radio to play the 'new' Supremes?...I don't..
I think Motown felt that Supremes airplay was taking away from solo Ross airplay[[it probably was),and Ross was struggling for hits[[with the exception of "Ain't No Mountain..")during 1970/1971 into 72..
who do you think the priority was?
and don't you think that Jean Terrell eventually figured this out,or someone figured it out for her?

That is very true Jimi. They were also concentrating on the Jackson Five at that time.

[marv2]

I agree, the average person is casual when it comes to pop music, and Motown did nothing to reach them with the news..people sitting in their living room when Sullivan said Ross was leaving the group, do you think the average person sitting on the couch was hanging on Ed's every word?..I was, but even then, I knew most people weren't; there wasn't a TV special celebrating this event [[and "Farewell" SHOULD have been on tv, but there was very little attention paid, and the "Farewell" album, as I recall, DIDN'T sell)..
the average yokel had been brainwashed with the name "Diana Ross & The Supremes" since 1967, so, by 1970,anything Supremes to the average yokel would always be attached to Ross, unless a huge campaign took place, and it didn't..
I don't remember Ross or Terrell being trotted up to NY Top 40 radio to announce/discuss the change, nocover photos on magazines like "Life" Or "Look" or any mainstream media, or even Rolling Stone, etc paying attention..
Motown DID NOT push this event, not to the mainstream public, not really,, they didn't


I understand what you are saying and agree. I do believe that Look Magazine ran a cover story on Ross before she went solo but mentioned that she would be going solo. I know Time ran articles about the New Supremes and of Ross new solo concerts. Ebony did a cover story and Dick Clark showed clips from the farewell concert on American Bandstand. It was a big entertainment news story in 1969-70. The most successful American music act was breaking up. If you were around back then, how could you not know? LOL? I am not asking that last question of Jimi, rhetorically speaking I mean.

[marv2]

Roger,
I do remember the confusion over "Up The Ladder To the Roof". DJ's constantly said it was Diana Ross and The Supremes.

That never happened where I lived or traveled. If anything, you would hear DJ's say " The New Supremes" and something about "Jeannie Terrell" being the sister of Heavyweight boxer Ernie Terrell. "Up the Ladder to the Roof" came out only a couple months after "Someday We'll Be Together" and the farewell concert for Diana Ross and the Supremes so our DJ's knew about that and were not dumb enough to make that simple mistake.

[marv2]

Not nearly as transparent as you Miss Looky. LOL

Now do you really want to go there Jonc / Clucketta?

[luke]

I lived near NY and Philly markets and never heard anything but" The Supremes " when Jean joined and their records announced. WABC, WIBG, WFIL...; I saw them at Atlantic City Steel Pier twice and the convention center was SRO.

[florence]

I think that Motown were genuinely surprised by the lack of success that DIANA ROSS's first solo effort "Reach Out And Touch" had compared with the first SUPREMES effort without her "Up the Ladder To The roof".

These are the respective chart positions .. Billboard for the US .. Guinness Book Of Hit records for the UK

"Up The Ladder To The Roof"
US "Pop" : 11 weeks, peaking at #10
US R&B : 13 weeks, peaking at #5
UK : 15 weeks, peaking at #6

"Reach Out And Touch"
US "Pop" : 9 weeks, peaking at #20
US R&B : 9 weeks, peaking at #7
UK : 5 weeks, peaking at #33

I think people at Motown were genuinely concerned that Diana's solo career was going to stall.

Indeed, those who have the 1970 volume of "The Complete Motown Singles" should check out the last track on Disc 52 which is a special disc sent out to Motown's distributors by Barney Ales complaining about the "underperformance" of "Reach Out And Touch", stating that everybody knew it was "a number one record" and implying that they weren't doing their job properly.

On this basis I can see that there may have been confusion amongst the record buying public about who was actually in the group. I had no such confusion, being a 16 year old Motown obsessive living in Sheffield, England, but then, when I think about it, being on a tight budget, I bought "Up The ladder To The Roof" at full price immediately upon release. It was only after a few months had gone by that a copy of "Reach Out And Touch" entered the collection [[a cheap ex-juke-box copy as I recall).

Roger


Wasn't it Diana herself who pushed for the release of "Reach Out And Touch"?

I had read that Berry didn't see any of the songs on the first solo album as being a big hit [[and that included Mountain! - how wrong can you get) and added the Johnny Bristol written "These Things Will Keep Me Loving You" intending it to be the lead single but Diana got her own way.

[BobC]

I never heard "Reach Out and Touch" at the time it came out, but have heard it many times since then--and I think it is a very weak record. I can't believe anyone thought that was single material. "Ain't No Mountain" and "Touch Me in the Morning" were far superior choices, IMO.

"Stoned Love" was a hit because it is frankly a masterful record. I only hear it a few times as a kid and still it grabbed me. When I first heard "Floy Joy" I was shocked at how hokey it was. "Automatically Sunshine" was, to me, boring old lady music. The first record I fell in love with was "Aquarius" by the 5th Dimension--but I noticed they also started doing what I considered boring old lady music in the early 70's. Ever heard the album "Living Together, Growing Together?" DREADFUL. No wonder they became "uncool."

[BayouMotownMan]

As I recall the actual US sales for Stoned Love was like 1.5 million. A huge hit for sure having outsold the Diana Ross-led singles except for Love Child, Gonna Make You Love Me and Someday We'll Be Together

[Jimi LaLumia]

and since we;re talking 'sales',any stats on River Deep Mountain High?

[motony]

Jimi, I think I heard 300,ooo for the Tops & Supremes River Deep which I thought sounded high.I find it hard to beleive that Stone Love sold over a million in the US.

[BayouMotownMan]

River Deep sold over 600,000 copies

[dianesfan_1965]

River Deep sold over 600,000 copies

Didn't it out sale Tina Turner's original?

[BayouMotownMan]

Oh yea it outsold Tina's original, by a long shot

[jillfoster]

Jimi, I think I heard 300,ooo for the Tops & Supremes River Deep which I thought sounded high.I find it hard to beleive that Stone Love sold over a million in the US.

it's not hard to believe at all. Once again, and i've mentioned this before... Stoned Love peaked the third week of December, any hit song will sell far more units when it peaks right in the heat of Christmas shopping season, especially the week before.

[Jimi LaLumia]

Ladder,Stoned and River deep are played frequently on WCBS FM NY the biggest oldies station in the country

[jillfoster]

To believe that sale I reckon you'd need to be 'stoned' yourself Marv2! You've just made it about the biggest selling single of the decade...

Of course, a compeltely ridiculous statement... the biggest selling single of the decade was Debby Boone's "You Light Up My Life" coming in at a little over 8 million copies.

[smark21]

Of course, a compeltely ridiculous statement... the biggest selling single of the decade was Debby Boone's "You Light Up My Life" coming in at a little over 8 million copies.

Well that's certainly proof positive of PT Barnum's quote [[or perhaps it was HL Menken's quote) : YOu will never go broke underestimating the taste of the American Public.

[marv2]

I lived near NY and Philly markets and never heard anything but" The Supremes " when Jean joined and their records announced. WABC, WIBG, WFIL...; I saw them at Atlantic City Steel Pier twice and the convention center was SRO.

That's right. You're talking about some of the biggest stations in the country serving the most densely populated markets not some Bug Tustle type place where it sounds like they have DJ's like the ones Captain James referred to in his post. I'll say it again, if you've heard of the group "Diana Ross & the Supremes" back then, then you also heard that she was replaced by a more soulful singer named Jean Terrell. Even if you cannot remember the name Jean Terrell in 2011 you heard it back at that time in America. Now that is not to say that every American citizen listen to Pop and or Soul Music. There are demographic groups that listen to what they like be it C&W, Classical, Acid Rock, Folk Music or whatever. The point I am making is that when the biggest group in the U.S. split up, it made the news and newspapers nationally.

[marv2]

I never heard "Reach Out and Touch" at the time it came out, but have heard it many times since then--and I think it is a very weak record. I can't believe anyone thought that was single material. "Ain't No Mountain" and "Touch Me in the Morning" were far superior choices, IMO.

"Stoned Love" was a hit because it is frankly a masterful record. I only hear it a few times as a kid and still it grabbed me. When I first heard "Floy Joy" I was shocked at how hokey it was. "Automatically Sunshine" was, to me, boring old lady music. The first record I fell in love with was "Aquarius" by the 5th Dimension--but I noticed they also started doing what I considered boring old lady music in the early 70's. Ever heard the album "Living Together, Growing Together?" DREADFUL. No wonder they became "uncool."

BobC, I heard "Reach Out and Touch Somebody's Hand" on the radio regularly during it's original release at least for a short while. Stations I listen to at that time were located in Detroit, Toledo, Ohio and Windsor Ontario [[CKLW the powerhouse of North America). It was nice song that we just didn't know what to do with it. The song however has been popular enough that it can be heard in some churches as a part of the benediction. I've heard sung in church a few times. It just didn't have the punch that many of the most popular songs had then like "Stoned Love". "War". "Ball of Confusion" "The Love Save".......all Motown releases, but all were powerful, soulful, rockin' recordings. Gladys Knight & the Pips "Friendship Train" also comes to mind now that I am thinking about it.

[marv2]

Jimi, I think I heard 300,ooo for the Tops & Supremes River Deep which I thought sounded high.I find it hard to beleive that Stone Love sold over a million in the US.

As much as both of those records were played even those figures sound on the low side to me. We bought the albums also.

[marv2]

it's not hard to believe at all. Once again, and i've mentioned this before... Stoned Love peaked the third week of December, any hit song will sell far more units when it peaks right in the heat of Christmas shopping season, especially the week before.

Jill, you are right as usual. In fact, "Stoned Love" was the number song in the country on the R&B/Soul Charts Christmas Week 1970.

[marv2]

Ladder,Stoned and River deep are played frequently on WCBS FM NY the biggest oldies station in the country


Jimi, they play them also on B-103 or 103.1 Long Island's Oldies Station located not far from me. For better understanding of the reach of this station, Long Island has approximately 3.1 Million residents which offers great potential for any radio station and even greater for 103.1 as it is the only Oldies Station the Island even though we also in the listening area for WCBS 101.1 Special shout out to Cousin Brucie! LOL!

[marv2]

Didn't it out sale Tina Turner's original?


You know I never even heard Ike & Tina Turners version until sometime in the mid 70's! I believe it was originally released back in 1966.

[marv2]

Of course, a compeltely ridiculous statement... the biggest selling single of the decade was Debby Boone's "You Light Up My Life" coming in at a little over 8 million copies.

Yeah I remember that song. It was like number one forever in 1977-78!

[marv2]

Well that's certainly proof positive of PT Barnum's quote [[or perhaps it was HL Menken's quote) : YOu will never go broke underestimating the taste of the American Public.


There was nothing wrong with that song. I actually liked it even though I was listening to more Funk and Soul music back then. I don't remember movie that it was from too much though.

[Jimi LaLumia]

what was talked about is that currently there is confusion about who's on what..
in 1970, NO ONE said that Ross was singing on any of the Terrell records,it's what happened in the subsequent years,and Motown's apparent indifference to the group, perhaps because of the quarrels with Mary, Jean wearing out, or the desired spotlight being aimed solely at Ross [[or all of the above,not to mention inferior singles choices as time went on)
the casual music fan/radio listeners pays no mind to any of these details anyway, they just don't, it's not important to them,which is why, in a country of hundreds of millions, a record that sold one million ,or even half a million, was a big deal back in the days before platinum

[motony]

Wow, thats hard to beleive that "River Deep" by Tops & Sups sold that much!Kudos to them, hope they got paid, LOL I love Phil & Tina too much to accept others doin their stuff, I must admit Levi & Jean sounded damn good.I guess 45's sales must have really gone up uring the early 70's compared to the 60's.Bigger audiance for Soul music in general, I guess.

[Jimi LaLumia]

the Ike & Tina version sold about 10 copies in America when it was released as a single, it was a total stiff, and this is what drove Phil Spector over the cliff so to speak..
it WAS a hit in New Jersey,oops, the UK, sorry....lol

[motony]

Well, I guess I was one of the ten.Dynamic.Really put Ike & Tina in the public spotlight. Southern Soul Stations in Fla. all played it.For a few weeks.Pop station in Miami where all Phils records were big, played it BUT Phil Spector had made very stupid comments about disc jockeys at a convention and so his bread & butter just quit playin his record to teach him a lesson...it worked & he really was finished as far as Philles Records.

[Jimi LaLumia]

it WAS dynamic, I'm a fan, but it WAS a stiff, so there was no public spotlight provided for I&T by that record, not in America, anyway..years later, it took on mythic status and people ASSUMED it was a hit, it wasn't..until The Supremes/4 Tops version

[marv2]

the Ike & Tina version sold about 10 copies in America when it was released as a single, it was a total stiff, and this is what drove Phil Spector over the cliff so to speak..
it WAS a hit in New Jersey,oops, the UK, sorry....lol


I've always liked Ike & Tina Turner [[Revue) as an act but when I hear how rough their version is compared to the Supremes & Four Tops, it is just no comparison as to which record sounded better in terms of vocals, harmonies, instrumentation and most of all , CLARITY....I loved the Supremes and Four Tops version more. I thought their version was the original version back at that time, 1970.

[motony]

Ike & Tina opening for the Stones was because of their association with Spector & Ike & Tina became more popular with the rock crowd & started getting better bookings & TV. It didn't hurt that River Deep was big in Europe & got heavy airplay on the pirate radio stations.I loved the Wall of Sound & thought the Beatles best records, as a group & solo, were those that Phil produced.

[Jimi LaLumia]

Ike & Tina River Deep peaked at #88 on the Hot 100,just looked it up

[roger]

The IKE & TINA TURNER original of "River Deep, Mountain High" was indeed a hit in the UK in 1966 .. debuting on 9th Jun 1966, spending 13 weeks on the charts and peaking at #3.

At the time the #1 spot on the UK sales charts was occupied by the likes of "Paperback Writer" by THE BRATLES and "Lazing On A Sunny Afternoon" by THE KINKS.

The record got a major push from offshore "pop-pirate" station Radio London and on the week of 26 Jun 1966 they actually had it as #1 on their survey [[which like a lot of radio station charts bore little relationship to actual sales)

Here it is at #1 on the "Big L Fab 40" ..

http://www.radiolondon.co.uk/rl/scrap60/fabforty/jun66/june664/fab260666.html

And for those chartoholics who want to map it's progress on the Fab 40 here is the index page for 1966 ..

http://www.radiolondon.co.uk/rl/scrap60/fabforty/index.html

At the time Radio London [[which broadcast from a ship off the coast of Essex) was most probably the most listened to Top 40 station in the world with a signal that covered most of Southern, Central and Eastern England [[not to mention Northern France, Belgium, Holland and parts of Germany) .. it was owned by the same group of Texas Businessmen who ran stations such as KLIF in Dallas and had a similar format.

The IKE & TINA TURNER original of "River Deep Mountain High" also had a renewed UK chart run in the spring of 1969 when it was re-promoted during the height of the British "Soul-Reissue" boom .. reaching #33 in a 7 week chart run.

In contrast the SUPREMES & FOUR TOPS remake only reached #11 on the UK charts in 1971, spending 10 weeks on the listings ..

Roger

Inidentally .. the "Essex" where Radio London was located was the area to the east of London in England .. NOT to be confused with the Essex in New Jersey ... :)

[Jimi LaLumia]

lol...good one..

[Bokiluis]

"Diana Ross presents The Jackson 5" had only "I Want You Back" and "Touch Me in the Morning", which obviously came out around the same time as "New Ways but Love Stays", had only the #1 title track as it's only single.

So everything was not conspiracy to undermine the other artists on the Motown stable. 2 of Motown's premiere acts were given similar treatment.

[Bokiluis]

"Diana Ross presents the Jackson 5" and "Touch Me in the Morning" both had #1 singles from two of Motown's key acts without a follow-up single. So there was no great conspiracy to undermine the other artists, including The Suprms 70s, for Diana's benefit.

Berry Gordy was a business man after all, and a darn successful one at that.

[johnjeb]

Diana Ross' "Everything Is Everything" LP was released a couple of months after "New Ways..." and had no singles from that LP in the US.

For a few years around the late 60s/early 70s Motown would release a batch of albums in the Fall. So I guess it was all about getting the product out for whatever sales objective they had at the time. It was a dilemma for us fans who had to make decisions on what to buy and when before some of the albums disappeared from the stores.

"Together We Can Make Such Sweet Music" was the only other song from "New Ways..." that could have been a commercial success for The Supremes. I don't understand why it was never released. Maybe they were saving it for a release by The Magnificent 7 from their album or by The Spinners, which eventually saw release in 1973 with a new mix. A lost opportunity for Motown, and of course The Supremes, to let a great song like that not get a single release.

[Bokiluis]

Berry Gordy had great business acumen. Do you think he would really walk away from a single that was working and selling?
I cannot get into Mr. Gordy's head, but, when he said he "washed his hands of dealing with The Supremes" when mary defied his suggestion to have the great Syreeta replace Diana instead of Jean. I think it meant that no longer would he be the top priority at the label that his focus would be elsewhere. That's very different than walking away from something that was selling and working.

[Bokiluis]

If "Reach Out and Touch [[Somebody's Hands)" was such a "weak record", Aretha recorded it for her iconic "Live at the Fillmore West" album. Yolanda Adams, arguably one of the most forceful voices in contemporary gospel, did a stirring version of it on Diana's inducted as a Kennedy Center Honoree as an indication that it indeed has a strong non-secular appeal. It has been covered by a host of artists especially during troubled times.

[marv2]

If "Reach Out and Touch [[Somebody's Hands)" was such a "weak record", Aretha recorded it for her iconic "Live at the Fillmore West" album. Yolanda Adams, arguably one of the most forceful voices in contemporary gospel, did a stirring version of it on Diana's inducted as a Kennedy Center Honoree as an indication that it indeed has a strong non-secular appeal. It has been covered by a host of artists especially during troubled times.

Yeah that was a weak record compared to what Motown was releasing at that time.

[luke]

Yes it was very odd for a Motown release. But no denying Diana worked it and had people holding hands. Id love to hear what Yolanda did with it--Diana aint exactly a rousing gospel singer.

[skooldem1]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ui_EmVOcYIE&feature=results_main&playnext=1&list=PL453167662580B67A

[Strange]

"Stoned Love" sold 3 million originally. I wonder how many copies it's sold overall or cumulative total is?


To believe that sale I reckon you'd need to be 'stoned' yourself Marv2! You've just made it about the biggest selling single of the decade...


]

Not true "Strange". I am not stoned, thanks. When I get back from Thanksgiving holiday [[and if I remember LOL), I'll reseach it for you and then can more readily accept what I just told you. Geez! LOL!!!

Well Marv2 I hope you enjoyed Thanksgiving and maybe can now enlighten me with your research that’ll give any semblance of credence to ‘Stoned Love’ shifting three million copies anywhere as a single, nevermind in the States!


As I recall the actual US sales for Stoned Love was like 1.5 million. A huge hit for sure having outsold the Diana Ross-led singles except for Love Child, Gonna Make You Love Me and Someday We'll Be Together

Well BayouMM, at least that figure is somewhat more realistic, but still way too high for the States. Maybe global, but even then doubtful. What, or from where, do you recall such a figure btw?

[Strange]

Jimi, I think I heard 300,ooo for the Tops & Supremes River Deep which I thought sounded high.I find it hard to beleive that Stone Love sold over a million in the US.

Motony is more in tune with how records were selling it seems in relation to their chart standings as best as we can ever know anyhow…but then as JillFoster writes, there are some additional seasonal factors at play here:


it's not hard to believe at all. Once again, and i've mentioned this before... Stoned Love peaked the third week of December, any hit song will sell far more units when it peaks right in the heat of Christmas shopping season, especially the week before.

But even so Jill, you’ve got to know the way charts work and are collated too, which you might do, I don’t know, but in this case peaking in the chart the third week of December only means that you peaked at street-level in the first week of December…sufficient difference to actually not be gaining from the heat of the Xmas shopping season! Additionally, the chart peak is usually the end of the re-order demand and pre-existing stock on the shelves will cater for most of the remaining buying interest.

But overall there would appear to be a reasonable chance that ‘Stoned Love’ might have won an RIAA gold award at the time had it been Motown’s policy to apply for the certifications. I just found it daft that Marv2 and others seem to go against all logic and dream up totals in the three million range. Which leads me to your other comment about that:


"Stoned Love" sold 3 million originally. I wonder how many copies it's sold overall or cumulative total is?


To believe that sale I reckon you'd need to be 'stoned' yourself Marv2! You've just made it about the biggest selling single of the decade...


Of course, a compeltely ridiculous statement... the biggest selling single of the decade was Debby Boone's "You Light Up My Life" coming in at a little over 8 million copies.

Where on earth did you ever imagine Ms Boone sold 8 million copies of ‘You Light Up My Life’ – it sure wasn’t the US!

As far as I’m concerned the RIAA is the official certifying body for record shipments in the States and although many mistakes and under and over-certifications no doubt exist, that is what we should go by. The highest certification for a physical single is four-times platinum during over 50-plus years of awards, so if you think Debby sold double that, well that’s ok, but let’s not let the known facts get in the way!

[BobC]

Bok--my feeling that that record was weak is just me stating my opinion, if that is okay with you. That's why I said it was "in my opinion." Second, I think the sales of that song confirm that I was not the only one who held that view.

Strange, "You Light" was an enormously huge record in the 70's in the US. I remember it very well--that and "Love Will Keep Us Together" were both massive singles. In fact, I would imagine it has sold more than 8 million at this point because everybody wanted it played at their weddings, engagement parties, anniversaries, etc. Don't get me wrong--I hated that song, but then I hate most "feel good" songs. I prefer feel bad songs. Which is why I went on to punk rock after disco started giving me a headache in the late 70's.

[Jimi LaLumia]

Jimi LaLumia & the Psychotic Frogs-Death To Disco..
one of your punk faves, Bob?

[jobeterob]

The rules for sales are if you like the artist, triple their sales.

If you don't like the artist, reduce the sales by 65%.

If you are nuts, make post after post, one after the other, answering yourself and convincing yourself you have to be right.

[BobC]

I was actually more into New Wave than hardcore punk. Bands like the Smiths and the Cure.

[marv2]

Well Marv2 I hope you enjoyed Thanksgiving and maybe can now enlighten me with your research that’ll give any semblance of credence to ‘Stoned Love’ shifting three million copies anywhere as a single, nevermind in the States!



Well BayouMM, at least that figure is somewhat more realistic, but still way too high for the States. Maybe global, but even then doubtful. What, or from where, do you recall such a figure btw?

I am in Detroit. I could try to track down Kenny Thomas who wrote song and ask him, or it will have to wait until I return to New York on Dec. 2. Thanks.

[marv2]

According to Wikipedia, "Stoned Love" sold 2.4 million copies worldwide. I don't believe they are the most accurate source however.

[smark21]

I was actually more into New Wave than hardcore punk. Bands like the Smiths and the Cure.

Joy Division is my favorite New Wave band. They could get very grim and "feel bad" with their material.

[Jimi LaLumia]

that's hardly punk...punk is Johnny Thunders & The Heartbreakers!...Cherry Vanilla!..Wayne County & the Electric Chairs[[these days, Wayne is now Jayne County!)

[BobC]

Hi Jimi and Smarksy--I love Joy Division! But they were never considered New Wave mainly because they came after the Sex Pistols but before bands like Culture Club, Smiths etc came on the scene. It was a progression. Have you seen the proto-video of "Atmosphere" by Joy Division? I never saw it back when it was released, but look it up on Youtube. It still brings tears to my eyes. As an artist, I can't believe the foresight and beautiful imagery in that vid. It also showed that a vid didn't have to spend millions.

And you listen to me, Jimi, love ya,mean it, but don't tell me what punk was. I lived it. I have read Cherry's memoirs, thanks to you, and although I loved her tales, She was mainly a reaction to 60's rock, but she never introduced anything original. I love her, but she wasn't creating a new musical style.

[Jimi LaLumia]

actually, I lived it...as to Cherry and anything original?
she was the first brazenly sexual white woman to thrust her ahem in your face, and do songs at Trude Heller in 1974 like "Whore On Fire"[[c'mon in baby, i'll take you much higher, c'mon in baby, my P****'s on FIRE!"), "Foxy Bitch", etc...
she was a road map for Madonna who 'interning' at Max's Kansas City in the late 70's during Vanilla's tenure there;
CV was very humble in her auto bio, but before Vanilla, there was nothing like her in rock music,in terms of the level of agressive sexuality [[for a white female) that she brought to the table,and the then 'rock" Madonna took notes and gave the Vanilla routine a dance beat in the early 80's..
CV may not have created a musical style, but she pioneered a new pop music 'stance' for women..
I'll tell you what punk was because I performed at Max's alongside the original junkie , ex-NY Doll Johnny Thunders and the notorious Sid Vicious when he did his last stance at Max's just prior to the death of groupie girlfriend Nancy Spungeon;
you can tell me about New Wave [[and i can tell you about New wave) but PUNK? I'd need a list of credentials...still love ya,BobC..

[florence]

As with most Supremes' and even Motown singles the truth is that nobody can say with any conviction exactly how many copies any single sold.

I can't see though why anyone would question that the single achieved the million mark in the US.

It has always been accepted and I have never heard anyone refute the fact that Stoned Love was the Supremes' biggest selling single after Diana left.

Over the years any estimation for Up The Ladder To The Roof has always been in the 800/900k range and nobody has disputed that and Stoned Love would certainly appear to have been a bigger seller.

Casbox is a more reliable measure of a record's sales as it didn't include an airplay factor in the period The Supremes were hitting the chart.

Ladder peaked at #9 at the end of April 1970 in an 11 week run while Stoned Love was on the chart for 15 weeks peaking at #5 in early January before falling off quickly having been in the top 10 during December- the biggest selling period of the year.

The Official Charts Company in the UK have it on 330k and the song also made #1 in France.

Ity will certainly be well over the 1.5m globally and the figure of 2.4m is perfectly possible.

[Strange]

Bok--my feeling that that record was weak is just me stating my opinion, if that is okay with you. That's why I said it was "in my opinion." Second, I think the sales of that song confirm that I was not the only one who held that view.

Strange, "You Light" was an enormously huge record in the 70's in the US. I remember it very well--that and "Love Will Keep Us Together" were both massive singles. In fact, I would imagine it has sold more than 8 million at this point because everybody wanted it played at their weddings, engagement parties, anniversaries, etc. Don't get me wrong--I hated that song, but then I hate most "feel good" songs. I prefer feel bad songs. Which is why I went on to punk rock after disco started giving me a headache in the late 70's.

Well I'm with you on those sympathies BobC. I too liked a bit of disco but gave way to punk and more particularly New Wave after everyone from the Stones to Frankie Valli decided they would jump on the disco bandwagon. Too much! 74-77 was enough already and punk was simply an antidote imho.

Anyway, personal preferences aside, you seem to be ignoring what I said about the RIAA never granting any single the whole 55-plus years of the rock era with anything more than four-times platinum. That tells us all we need to know about records not selling what the artists/labels/management/media have led us to believe. Simple as that. You're getting sucked in by all that hype and nonsense man, and eight million for 'You Light Up My Life' is more than double what it really managed. At best it could be 3.6m or so, but that will be with plenty of discounting and extras even then like the good old freebies...

And yup, it sucks and so did most of Captain & Tennile's stuff [[Whitburn placed 'Love Will Keep Us Together' top of 1975 - probably not shipping two million net to do so - as Boone was top in 1977 in his Billboard chart rankings btw) but loads of folk obviously dug all that sugar coating!

[BobC]

You know Strange I had a friend who was over ten years older than I was, who used to be a DJ in the 70's [[he was still playing in a bar in the 90's when I met him) and one day we started talking about music. I told him I was really into black music, pre-disco, and he told me something I never forgot. He told me that dance music in the early mid-70's was beautiful music with great orchestration--bands like Love Unlimited, Barry White, Three Degrees, etc. It was only in the late 70's when dance music became faddy disco that everything went downhill. I never really thought of that, but he was right. I could never put a great song like "When Will I see You Again" in the disco bin. Nor anything by Barry White and his various incarnations.

Jimi--listen here young man! I read Cherry's memoirs, upon your recommendation! I know all about her now, you little scamp. And yes she did thrust her...face...and other body parts into the national consciousness!! I love people like her who rattle the pop cage! Still, though, When I think of punk I think of the Sex Pistols, Iggy Pop, NY Dolls, Siouxxie and the Banshees, people like that. Today there are so many genres of music--but back then you only had maybe five categories. I liked punk because it was rebellious--a great alternative to "You Light Up My Life" and songs like that that I couldn't relate to at all. I call them "if you leave me I'll drop dead" songs. Blech.

[Strange]

I am in Detroit. I could try to track down Kenny Thomas who wrote song and ask him, or it will have to wait until I return to New York on Dec. 2. Thanks.

That'll be good of you Marv2, the writer is the one who really knows as they get publishing reports and returns. It is one of the reasons I know that he won't be telling you three million for the US!

And no, Wikipedia have a habit of not being resoundingly accurate when it comes to estimated sales and the like, almost always being written by fans who know little about the industry and tending to go for top-end claims. So if they too are saying 2.4m worldwide then I guess you shouldn't bother Kenny Thomas after all about the 3m!

[Strange]

I call them "if you leave me I'll drop dead" songs. Blech.

Ha! More like if you don't stop that catawauling I'll drop dead BobC [[or someone will!). But then I guess our Debby was the daughter of the rather rightgeous Pat Boone so all that milk and honey was kinda natural for the poor girl. Anyway, it kept them in spangly suits a while I guess...

[marv2]

That'll be good of you Marv2, the writer is the one who really knows as they get publishing reports and returns. It is one of the reasons I know that he won't be telling you three million for the US!

And no, Wikipedia have a habit of not being resoundingly accurate when it comes to estimated sales and the like, almost always being written by fans who know little about the industry and tending to go for top-end claims. So if they too are saying 2.4m worldwide then I guess you shouldn't bother Kenny Thomas after all about the 3m!


i hope you know I was kidding. I am not going through all that trouble and you're not even paying me! LOL! Psyche!
LOL!!!

[Strange]

As with most Supremes' and even Motown singles the truth is that nobody can say with any conviction exactly how many copies any single sold.

I can't see though why anyone would question that the single achieved the million mark in the US.

It has always been accepted and I have never heard anyone refute the fact that Stoned Love was the Supremes' biggest selling single after Diana left.

Over the years any estimation for Up The Ladder To The Roof has always been in the 800/900k range and nobody has disputed that and Stoned Love would certainly appear to have been a bigger seller.

Casbox is a more reliable measure of a record's sales as it didn't include an airplay factor in the period The Supremes were hitting the chart.

Ladder peaked at #9 at the end of April 1970 in an 11 week run while Stoned Love was on the chart for 15 weeks peaking at #5 in early January before falling off quickly having been in the top 10 during December- the biggest selling period of the year.

The Official Charts Company in the UK have it on 330k and the song also made #1 in France.

Ity will certainly be well over the 1.5m globally and the figure of 2.4m is perfectly possible.

Well it isn't about anyone being able to say with any conviction what a single may or may not have sold, it is about having a very good idea based on what records really sold at the time, the RIAA awards they received [[if applied for of course) and with an eye on the charts and what the competition were doing. There are many folk who can say within those parameters and I guess you're possibly one of them too as you've made a statement about Stoned Love's sales in the UK apparently based on what a body like the Official Charts Company has stated - and not many will know about that without researching more than a little.

Equally your Cash Box info is spot on, and there is enough latitude with Christmas period sales to possibly have meant as I said earlier that 'Stoned Love' could have been a genuine RIAA gold disc winner if Motown had've been applying for them at the time. But that is not in dispute, 3m worldwide is...

I've not been aware of the 'Up The Ladder' being accepted as within the 800/900k range, and maybe there is something I'm missing here? You're sort of maintaining 'Stoned Love' shouldn't be disputed as a million-seller Stateside because of that I guess, because just being the bigger chart hit in comparison with another from March/April time in 1970 isn't really enough to go on. If, for instance 800k was the UTL total, then we are saying SL needs to have sold 25% more at least to get to gold. Shift UTL down just 50k and we are looking at a third more copies needed...

The balance of probabilities is still that Stoned Love was just worthy of an RIAA gold disc on gross shipments, but the closer we look at things more doubt enters the equation, that is all I'm saying! And certainly 3m is hogwash. As for then extending a 'definite maybe' US one million sales into 2.4m worldwide is exactly what Motown and Mr. Gordy's publicity machine were good at having folk believe and accept. The 1.5m is possible, but I seriously doubt that too. Where did you get the No. 1 in France info may I ask?

[Strange]

Lol Marv2. You're one to watch then! I actually thought you were mad as a march hare and believed all that 3m, 2.4m and so on stuff about Stoned Love's sales. Franjoy56 asked the question and Jobeterob first came out with the 3m revelation from some fast-buck book of lists or something so I thought it was all serious.

Anyway, some might have learnt something from my theorising! A little? Oh well, nevermind...

[motony]

Motown always downplayed sales to the artists.I don't know about the writers & producers.

[jobeterob]

I actually misquoted the Hitsville Motown 1972 - 1992 booklet when I referred to 3 million copies of Stoned Love being sold.

What it says, written by Terry Barnes, is:

Only a month after Diana's departure, the re-invented Supremes came with a Top 10 hit, Up the Ladder to the Roof. The same year they released Stoned Love, which sold an astounding 2.3 million copies. But there would be no more #1's. Not that the Supremes sounded any different; youth culture had moved on.

Further on, it says: Smokey wrote Floy Joy with Mary's voice in mind, and recorded it as a duet with Jean Terrell. It was the Supremes last Top 20 single and the last to sell over 500,000 copies.

In the Ross section, Stewart Francke wrote: An aching ballad both insistent and permissive, Touch Me In The Morning, further evidenced the vulnerability in Ross's makeup; after the enormous success of the single [[21 weeks on the charts in 1973, longer than any Supremes song), Ross was far less an enigma to her audience. she was now no longer associated with the Supremes - she was an archetypical 70's role model.

And later: Diana's last great success in this period came in 1981 with Endless Love, a duet with Lionel Richie. Endless Love, written by Richie, topped the pop charts for 10 weeks and sold over 3 million copies.

Diana Ross transcends the notion of a singer merely rendering a song. Her voice infiltrates, even conjures, the seemingly small elements of living: hope after loss, letting a fantasy remain unrequited, learning forgiveness alongside self reliance, a remembered spring, a lost childhood. After all this time she remains one of the post rock era's most subtly stunning singers.

With respect to Michael Jackson, David Ritz wrote: Considering the theme morbid [[Ben), a few radio stations were initially reluctant to play the single. But public taste prevailed. Ben sold some 1.7 million copies and was nominated for an Academy Award.

And later: At the end of his Motown career, Jackson had recorded more major hits than most artists produce in forty year careers. More amazing still, Michael was only 17, with worlds of creativity and unprecedented popularity still ahead.

With respect to Dancing Machine, it says: He [[Michael) created a classic street dance and before it was over, the single sold two million copies.

David Ritz also writes that one Billboard account says the Miracles's single Love Machine, was the most successful Miracles single of all time.

With respect to Rick James, Scott Galloway wrote: His first single, You and I, was an out of the box smash and established Rick as a platinum selling superstar. In 1981, the stakes were raised when his 5th album, Street Songs, sold over 3 million copies domestically. [[Perhaps that means some of the other figures quoted were not domestic, but worldwide).

[florence]

Where did you get the No. 1 in France info may I ask?




http://tsort.info/music/33a5uh.htm

[Jimi LaLumia]

Gordy called his hits double #1's, because when they hit big, they found a huge white audience as well as a huge black audience, something that neither Debbie Boone or Captain & Tennille did;
so I have no problem believing that Stoned Love sold well over 2 million copies between the black and white record markets during a holiday period,and the only folks that do obviously have some other agenda at work,God knows what,,

[Strange]

http://tsort.info/music/33a5uh.htm

A neat site, thanks for sharing.

But don't rely on the details for France judging by that entry though as it seems somewhat misguided, especially if you look at the other entries [[I should say non-entries) from that country.

Perhaps the creators can double-check their source?

[Strange]

Gordy called his hits double #1's, because when they hit big, they found a huge white audience as well as a huge black audience, something that neither Debbie Boone or Captain & Tennille did;
so I have no problem believing that Stoned Love sold well over 2 million copies between the black and white record markets during a holiday period,and the only folks that do obviously have some other agenda at work,God knows what,,

Mmmm, when I see the word agenda I immediately know I'm in the wrong place for any sensible discussion.

Look Jimi, the tough questions are always there to be asked and if, as says the RIAA, four million shipments is the most any single has managed to be certified for in the entire rock era, how can you sensibly say a record that made No. 7 in the Hot 100 - at Christmastime or otherwise - is over two million?

I mean, it don't add up man! Gordy wasn't gonna downplay his acts, that ain't showbiz, but if you ever took time out to really study the industry and its hype across all genres, styles and eras, then you'd grasp that basic fact. Unless you're saying the RIAA were the ones with the problem...?

[tomato tom]

I always wondered why lots of 45s that showed big on the U.S. Charts ended up in the UK with drill holes in them. Meaning, unsold, returned.???.

[jobeterob]

Holes definitely meant deleted and unsold ~ but tallied up when they counted Sales!

One of the reasons that Stoned Love never got further up the charts is that in those days, one of the components making up chart position was airplay and Stoned Love got less airplay than it otherwise would have because of the title "STONED Love"; and we know that is still being discussed 40 years later.

But those of you that state there is a lot of overstatement, misstatement, playing games with shipments that get returned 2 months later and all that ~ all makes sense. And so it's hard to know the truth.

[BobC]

I hate all the phoniness around smoking weed. Especially today. Just about every person under under 60 has at least tried it, so I fail to see what the the hysteria was/is all about. Good GOD--it's not like you're banging heroin.

[Jimi LaLumia]

Cherry Vanilla wound up being The Velvelettes of punk: I guess Blondie was the Supremes of punk, and Patti Smith was the Martha & Vandellas of NY punk..
JohnnyThunders & The Heartbreakers were the Jr.Walker & the All Stars of punk, and Jayne County was the Shorty Long of punk..

[marv2]

Holes definitely meant deleted and unsold ~ but tallied up when they counted Sales!

One of the reasons that Stoned Love never got further up the charts is that in those days, one of the components making up chart position was airplay and Stoned Love got less airplay than it otherwise would have because of the title "STONED Love"; and we know that is still being discussed 40 years later.

But those of you that state there is a lot of overstatement, misstatement, playing games with shipments that get returned 2 months later and all that ~ all makes sense. And so it's hard to know the truth.


Stoned Love received plenty of airplay which is how it became one of the Supremes and
Motown's greatest hits.

[florence]

A neat site, thanks for sharing.

But don't rely on the details for France judging by that entry though as it seems somewhat misguided, especially if you look at the other entries [[I should say non-entries) from that country.

Perhaps the creators can double-check their source?

Can't speak for other countries but certainly the entries for the US and UK are accurate.

[florence]

While it is a useful tool what exactly does an RIAA certification tell you?

Take the 1m mark for example - in some cases after the certification is claimed returns will be made so the record has not even sold 1m but the award is not rescinded.

But once it reaches 1m there is no way of knowing how many more it sells, the next award level is 2m - it could just have crept past the 1m or sold 1.9m!

I personally tend to believe the figures JR Taraborrelli quoted in the 80s many also do but then just as many don't.

Then there is the weird situation when Motown claimed certifications in 1997 for a handful of singles I'm Gonna Make You Love Me, Baby Love, Stop! In The Name Of Love and Someday We'll Be Together.

Even though the records were released before the certification levels dropped they only had to reach the new level.

If for example Baby Love sold the the 2/3m which many claimed why when they had gone to the trouble of claiming a "posthumpus" award would they only claim Gold and not Platinum?

Ah well, the Supremes' sales conundrum will continue and never be resolved.

[jobeterob]

All of that is correct Florence with the exception that the RIAA didn't/doesn't even measure sales ~ its measures shipments ~ half of which could be returned.

And there were examples around of big records companies with name artists shipping millions and seeing millions returned ~ but they didn't want their name artists failing. I'm pretty sure there were allegations of this being done by Sony and Arista with Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston on some of their less successful releases.

[Strange]

Holes definitely meant deleted and unsold ~ but tallied up when they counted Sales!

One of the reasons that Stoned Love never got further up the charts is that in those days, one of the components making up chart position was airplay and Stoned Love got less airplay than it otherwise would have because of the title "STONED Love"; and we know that is still being discussed 40 years later.

But those of you that state there is a lot of overstatement, misstatement, playing games with shipments that get returned 2 months later and all that ~ all makes sense. And so it's hard to know the truth.

Firstly Paulo - you are very astute sir. There was a very nice trade in transhipping overseas of unsold/deleted stock, and most often the UK [[and Canada) was the destination.

Jobeterob - yes indeed, deleted and unsold in the US and then recycled as cut-outs or more likely simply scrapped. Vast numbers were scrapped, and the transhipping or indirect export market was able to soak up so much slack, the cheaper price of buying up the record with 'holes' being augmented further by a gain on taxation differences. Very complicated, but certainly not true US sales as you seem to be suggesting [[although forgive me if I'm misunderstanding you).

What might have been counted if Motown had've been interested were the RIAA award. So if Stoned Love had've shipped one million, then the RIAA auditors were invited in to see the sales dockets, the certification would have been granted and we all think one million copies were bought/sold in the States. This is not so, as Florence also mentioned above. What we know is that many awards were based on over-shipping in the sixties and seventies; supported further by freebies; devalued even more by the many returns and finally confused the hell out of artists and acts when royalties were so low. This applied from the Beatles to Pink Floyd as well as all the Motown gang of acts. It was made worse if they were stitched up with the contracts and they didn't have the mouthpieces they neeeded - whereas the white groups were more able to work around all that after a bit of time, and largely because they were represented by English lawyers too I suspect...

Anyway, all that aside, you seem to instinctively know that there was plenty of mis-statements and claims, so all I'm pointing out is the real truth is most of the singles were similar sellers according to the time of release and length/size of chart career. The airplay component is a distraction as that is only really important and relevant beneath the Top 40, higher up the sales drove the position. All the Top 40 stations wanted to play a Top 40 hit as it was in their interests to and because it was expected - their reason to be if you like. If a few got picky about 'Stoned' being in the title then plenty of R&B genre stations took up the slack, I'm sure.

Stoned Love was probably due an RIAA award at the time, but would - and probably has - fail in a count these days because of all the returns etc, I've explained about. I just don't care much but I did baulk at the 3m idea!

[skooldem1]

Hey Strange- you are confusing them with the facts. LMAO. The only thing they are interested in is how this record out sold some records that were released by Diana Ross and the Supremes. Thats really what this thread is about. This record had to have sold 4 million copies, it has to be the biggest selling Supreme song. It has to, it just has to.....

[motownlover1964]

Although I rarely post it is fascinating that this conversation about record sales never really goes away. I also suspect we'll never know, and with the various explanations in this thread that I find interesting, only shows that the definitive number is relative at best. I wonder if all the Motown announcements back in the day about "million sellers" distorted things, not only for the artists, but for the general public at large.

[Strange]

Can't speak for other countries but certainly the entries for the US and UK are accurate.

Well yes, the US and UK details appear fine enough, but I can confirm that 'Stoned Love' never made the French charts, and to be honest I don't think the group [[with or without Diana) ever made the Top Ten there...I would be very surprised if they ever sold more than 20% of what they sold in the US and UK combined in the rest of the world.

A lot of hard work went into that site and I guess that it is just unlucky that you happened to quote a whopping great error as I am loathe to criticise all that endeavor when it is based on facts [[unlike that other link you provided with someone's idea of the sales of everything by anyone ever!).

[jobeterob]

Three really good posts from Skool, Motown Lover and Strange.

Interesting about a lot of the shipments ending up in Canada.............because I used to get a lot of Motown records with holes in them at 10 or 15 records for $1.00. And I knew Motown a lot better than most people up here, so I'd be thrilled.

I agree with Strange's comment about "true" US sales; the figures I quoted out of the Hitsville book seem awfully high to me; generally, anything out of the record companies mouth is inflated.

There was only one comment I disagree with and it was Skool's comment about "they" want Stoned Love's sales to be above those of other Diana Ross and The Supremes records...............LOL! I think there is only one, perhaps two, people that WANT or NEED that in order for their day to carry on without stress; and we know who that is. But most of the rest of us.......it's just historically interesting. Right??

[marv2]

Three really good posts from Skool, Motown Lover and Strange.

Interesting about a lot of the shipments ending up in Canada.............because I used to get a lot of Motown records with holes in them at 10 or 15 records for $1.00. And I knew Motown a lot better than most people up here, so I'd be thrilled.

I agree with Strange's comment about "true" US sales; the figures I quoted out of the Hitsville book seem awfully high to me; generally, anything out of the record companies mouth is inflated.

There was only one comment I disagree with and it was Skool's comment about "they" want Stoned Love's sales to be above those of other Diana Ross and The Supremes records...............LOL! I think there is only one, perhaps two, people that WANT or NEED that in order for their day to carry on without stress; and we know who that is. But most of the rest of us.......it's just historically interesting. Right??

"Stoned Love" was one of the highest selling Motown Records singles.

[marv2]

Three really good posts from Skool, Motown Lover and Strange.

Interesting about a lot of the shipments ending up in Canada.............because I used to get a lot of Motown records with holes in them at 10 or 15 records for $1.00. And I knew Motown a lot better than most people up here, so I'd be thrilled.

I agree with Strange's comment about "true" US sales; the figures I quoted out of the Hitsville book seem awfully high to me; generally, anything out of the record companies mouth is inflated.

There was only one comment I disagree with and it was Skool's comment about "they" want Stoned Love's sales to be above those of other Diana Ross and The Supremes records...............LOL! I think there is only one, perhaps two, people that WANT or NEED that in order for their day to carry on without stress; and we know who that is. But most of the rest of us.......it's just historically interesting. Right??

Motown and Soul music in general was popular in Eastern Canada and still is. Maybe not as much as out in Western Canada, but in Toronto, Montreal, the rest of Ontario it was very popular.

[jobeterob]

See!!!!!!!!!

[Strange]

While it is a useful tool what exactly does an RIAA certification tell you?

Take the 1m mark for example - in some cases after the certification is claimed returns will be made so the record has not even sold 1m but the award is not rescinded.

But once it reaches 1m there is no way of knowing how many more it sells, the next award level is 2m - it could just have crept past the 1m or sold 1.9m!



All of that is correct Florence with the exception that the RIAA didn't/doesn't even measure sales ~ its measures shipments ~ half of which could be returned.

And there were examples around of big records companies with name artists shipping millions and seeing millions returned ~ but they didn't want their name artists failing. I'm pretty sure there were allegations of this being done by Sony and Arista with Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston on some of their less successful releases.

Yes jobeterob, as you so rightly say, shipments is what the Recording Industry Association of America [[RIAA) - the watchdog of the record industry if you like, but having been set-up and created by its members then with a vested interest in doing their bidding too! – tries to measure. All I can say is we have to trust in their intentions and auditors who actually visit the record companies to scrutinise the sales dockets/papers or whatever to confirm or deny a certification request.

The request bit is equally important as there can be no award considered unless the company/label invite the RIAA auditors along to check the veracity of what they’re claiming has been shipped. It isn’t a bad system, but especially in the late sixties and into the seventies there were plenty of ways and means to circumnavigate the rules, and one was to ship large early, call in the auditors, then when they’d gone the returns would flood in and make a mockery of the award.

So a time-delay rule was introduced before a record could be certified after release but, as you point out, the biggest acts can just ignore that too as they have the clout to force dealers and wholesalers to take what will be a mega-seller anyway. You have to play ball, so the old industry joke ‘shipped gold, returned platinum’ still applies only it went to ‘shipped platinum, returned multi-platinum’. Lol.

So Florence, you do make a good point again about the ‘failings’ of the RIAA system in so many ways, but they can all be taken into account if you look at the thousands of awards over 50-plus years as a whole. It will never be scientific but there are patterns and they tell a story that highlights pretty well when a freak [[i.e. inaccurate) result or claim is made such as that 3m for Stoned Love. It can’t be right!

You also have to assume that every label is ‘at it’ to some degree or another. Hell, this is the US of A, and the American way is to compete! Therefore if one award was a ‘cheap’ one, so potentially is another within the same time period and apparent performance. That is measured – again, not scientifically by any means – by looking at the overall trend of the various charts [[Billboard, Cash Box and Record World being the big three must haves) for a hit and making a judgement.

It’s a game, a hobby, a waste of time for sure, but a fairminded approach can result in fairly good estimates of what most records within given ranges sold. Back these up with known awards, media sales reports [[always taking care that they fit the expected pattern/model) and maybe for those with a buddy in the industry, or who knows a songwriter, even some actual royalty or publisher sales info might become available.

So I would say it is defeatist to simply say “but once it reaches 1m there is no way of knowing how many more it sells, the next award level is 2m - it could just have crept past the 1m or sold 1.9m!”; that is true about everything pretty much! What you can do is say, ok, this single is platinum and is therefore confirmed as shipping between 1,000,000 and 1,999,999 because it didn’t hit double platinum when the auditors came visit. The solution? Easy, apply the good old happy medium to each award level and in this case allow for 1.5m. Some mathematicians would go further and argue that statistically that isn’t correct and the median level is lower still, that’s fine if they really want to bash their brains out on it. But like I say, it is a bit of fun and when considering big acts like the Supremes or Diana, who are gonna be in the tens of millions of sales in the end anyway, the odd error here and there of even a couple hundred thousand will iron itself out, especially considering the number of releases involved.

There, it’s official, I’m an anorak!

[Strange]

Hey Strange- you are confusing them with the facts. LMAO. The only thing they are interested in is how this record out sold some records that were released by Diana Ross and the Supremes. Thats really what this thread is about. This record had to have sold 4 million copies, it has to be the biggest selling Supreme song. It has to, it just has to.....

Lol skooldem! I like your sense of humour man.

Damn fine record; damn fine group; common sense on stats never gonna be found on fan forums though, eh?


Although I rarely post it is fascinating that this conversation about record sales never really goes away. I also suspect we'll never know, and with the various explanations in this thread that I find interesting, only shows that the definitive number is relative at best. I wonder if all the Motown announcements back in the day about "million sellers" distorted things, not only for the artists, but for the general public at large.

Well motownlover1964, the music is the main vibe with me, but I like messing with numbers and figures and so I got inquisitive I guess and like I said above, we might never know down to the final zero what any record sold but we can put them in the right ballpark – if we’re interested.

If not, that’s fine too. Only adding what I can to the theme of the thread and glad some also join in and get to think about it for a laugh. There is no doubt that the Motown announcements over the years were ‘distorted’, as you put it. It was always about hype, promotion and so on. The Beatles and Elvis had their fair share too you’ll be glad to know…sell the sizzle!

[motony]

Motown was the leading record company in 45 sales in the industry in the 60's. Motown also was bootlegged bad in Central & South America. If they would have had legitimate sales in those countries I bet it would surpass Europe.

[Strange]

Three really good posts from Skool, Motown Lover and Strange.

Interesting about a lot of the shipments ending up in Canada.............because I used to get a lot of Motown records with holes in them at 10 or 15 records for $1.00. And I knew Motown a lot better than most people up here, so I'd be thrilled.

I agree with Strange's comment about "true" US sales; the figures I quoted out of the Hitsville book seem awfully high to me; generally, anything out of the record companies mouth is inflated.

There was only one comment I disagree with and it was Skool's comment about "they" want Stoned Love's sales to be above those of other Diana Ross and The Supremes records...............LOL! I think there is only one, perhaps two, people that WANT or NEED that in order for their day to carry on without stress; and we know who that is. But most of the rest of us.......it's just historically interesting. Right??

Well for my part I try my best jobeterob - neat use of the name btw. It's just a hobby and historically interesting in a small way I guess; people can make a living out of publishing books that just regurgitate dumb facts and figures that mean little and have even less connection with reality! Talking of which, any more figures from that Hitsville book that strike you as odd???

The 'holey' records is mostly a US phenom, you won't find the practice of huge over-shipping and returns/scraps/cut-outs in other countries as the marketing environment and size of the country mitigated against it. But to ensure a hit in those days that was fully supplied if it broke nationally then the presses had to roll and the One Stops and Racks had to have the product. If it clicked, happy days; if it didn't, the losses weren't insurmountable providing you had a good strike rate.

We can all agree that Motown were maybe unique in that area!

[Strange]

Motony - I recall having discussions about bootlegs and as it is an illegal practice there is hardly gonna be anyone lining up to claim he shifted a few thousand of this or that - and again it affects all the big stars.

Then you got counterfeits and piracy - Asia nowadays for the latter and Eastern Europe in the commie times for the former. No-one knows; I don't care to know as it might involve broken legs...lol.

Let's stick to the professional fibbers who are at least operating within the law, eh?! Leave the Al Capone's to their rackets.

[BobC]

No one's paying me no mind...

[Strange]

I personally tend to believe the figures JR Taraborrelli quoted in the 80s many also do but then just as many don't.

Then there is the weird situation when Motown claimed certifications in 1997 for a handful of singles I'm Gonna Make You Love Me, Baby Love, Stop! In The Name Of Love and Someday We'll Be Together.

Even though the records were released before the certification levels dropped they only had to reach the new level.

If for example Baby Love sold the the 2/3m which many claimed why when they had gone to the trouble of claiming a "posthumpus" award would they only claim Gold and not Platinum?

Ah well, the Supremes' sales conundrum will continue and never be resolved.

Florence, overlooked your Taraborrelli remarks and seeing as you have some neat links I wonder if you have that 80s info as it sounds interesting too?

As for the 1997 and 1999 certifications by the RIAA after Universal went digging through the old Motown papers, you see again how scratching about beneath the surface there is plenty of pointers as to what was selling what, even if, as you say, it surfaces many years after the times.

The Beatles, Stones, Streisand, Presley, Elton John, Neil Diamond labels all went and retrospectively went back to the sales paperwork and got the RIAA auditors to give their certification blessings. As I said earlier, we have to trust the independence of these guys and the findings give a very good snapshot of the what were the biggest sellers of the day. What’s more, the use of the updated post-1988 certification levels of 500k for gold and 1m for platinum and so on, well that tells us plenty about the true value of the original gold awards. We get to see that many must’ve returned beneath the original gold for 1m as they didn’t get upgraded…the artists and labels still liked the kudos and publicity of the platinum but obviously they couldn’t always get it!

‘Baby Love’ didn’t ship one million copies net. End of story. The RIAA say it didn’t, and short of a statement from Universal/Motown saying why, we have to assume that is the reality. That isn’t to say one million copies didn’t get shipped out; it doesn’t even confirm a million copies weren’t bought by Joe Public. What it tells us is an audit inspection around September 1997 they could only settle on a confirmed shipment figure between 500,000 and 999,999, and that is probably 950k-plus for sure. Same for ‘Stop In the Name of Love’, but for whatever reason the rest of the singles until the later ones you mention were not put forward for certification.

Apart from conspiracy theories the results are in as far as I can see to recognise the truth that selling a million copies in the sixties was a tough ask. And so it should be!

The claims of 2/3 million were from nowhere but the marketing and publicity departments, and who knows how they counted! Both sides of the single is legit if you don’t get specific I guess and just say the ‘single sold 2/3 million’.

There is no conundrum, just slick sales spiel!

[jobeterob]

The sales figures I recited above for Street Songs, Endless Love, Ben and Stoned Love were from the booklet that goes with the box set - Hitsville USA 1972 - 1992.

But I believe all those people are gone from Universal; hasn't it all been taken over by Hip O and the current guys?

[florence]

Florence, overlooked your Taraborrelli remarks and seeing as you have some neat links I wonder if you have that 80s info as it sounds interesting too?

As for the 1997 and 1999 certifications by the RIAA after Universal went digging through the old Motown papers, you see again how scratching about beneath the surface there is plenty of pointers as to what was selling what, even if, as you say, it surfaces many years after the times.

The Beatles, Stones, Streisand, Presley, Elton John, Neil Diamond labels all went and retrospectively went back to the sales paperwork and got the RIAA auditors to give their certification blessings. As I said earlier, we have to trust the independence of these guys and the findings give a very good snapshot of the what were the biggest sellers of the day. What’s more, the use of the updated post-1988 certification levels of 500k for gold and 1m for platinum and so on, well that tells us plenty about the true value of the original gold awards. We get to see that many must’ve returned beneath the original gold for 1m as they didn’t get upgraded…the artists and labels still liked the kudos and publicity of the platinum but obviously they couldn’t always get it!

‘Baby Love’ didn’t ship one million copies net. End of story. The RIAA say it didn’t, and short of a statement from Universal/Motown saying why, we have to assume that is the reality. That isn’t to say one million copies didn’t get shipped out; it doesn’t even confirm a million copies weren’t bought by Joe Public. What it tells us is an audit inspection around September 1997 they could only settle on a confirmed shipment figure between 500,000 and 999,999, and that is probably 950k-plus for sure. Same for ‘Stop In the Name of Love’, but for whatever reason the rest of the singles until the later ones you mention were not put forward for certification.

Apart from conspiracy theories the results are in as far as I can see to recognise the truth that selling a million copies in the sixties was a tough ask. And so it should be!

The claims of 2/3 million were from nowhere but the marketing and publicity departments, and who knows how they counted! Both sides of the single is legit if you don’t get specific I guess and just say the ‘single sold 2/3 million’.

There is no conundrum, just slick sales spiel!


Motown wasn't a member of the RIAA back in the 60s [[and most of the 70s I believe) otherwise we might have had some solid certifications.

I don't know exactly how the RIAA verify a claim but I always thought the company submitted the paperwork with "proof". Maybe someone could explain?

I don't know that the RIAA is saying Baby Love didn't sell 1m but rather that they have seen only data to support 500k.

Wasn't Motown's accounting imcomplete and a bit of a shambles and much of it mislaid or lost in later years so that Universal could only claim what hard data they had? The fact that they only submitted claims for 4 singles might point to this.

I couldn't make any certain claims as to how many, if any, Supremes' singles sold 1m but I would be surprised if neither You Can't Hurry Love nor Love Child passed the figure.

If you were basing your assumptions on the 1997 certifications it would mean that neither would have sold 500k. There's no way of proving they did, of course, but it would beggar belief.

Unless a lot of false claims were made and downright lies were told there must be at least a dozen Supremes' singles which passed 500k based on the chart performances. Love Child for example was on the Cashbox Chart for nearly 4 months with 3 weeks at #1 and a couple at #2 during the biggest selling period of the year. It wouldn't make sense it didn't even do 500k.

Anyway, I'll get JRT's book out and post what figurres he gives. Many agree with these, then again just as many don't!

[Strange]

I actually misquoted the Hitsville Motown 1972 - 1992 booklet when I referred to 3 million copies of Stoned Love being sold.

What it says, written by Terry Barnes, is:

Only a month after Diana's departure, the re-invented Supremes came with a Top 10 hit, Up the Ladder to the Roof. The same year they released Stoned Love, which sold an astounding 2.3 million copies. But there would be no more #1's. Not that the Supremes sounded any different; youth culture had moved on.

Sorry Jobeterob, was giving it too much spiel myself and overlooked your post detailing the other sales ‘revelations’. For what it’s worth, one-by-one, I’d say the ‘Stoned Love’ figures in the Hitsville Motown booklet are still too high however we reason it – domestic gross; domestic net or even world gross/net. As I pointed out to Florence concerning the inaccurate French No. 1 claim, the reality is that the Supremes [[and Motown generally) were never big sellers in their heyday outside of the US/UK. The odd exception, but those two would almost always represent 80% or more of the sales/shipments.



Further on, it says: Smokey wrote Floy Joy with Mary's voice in mind, and recorded it as a duet with Jean Terrell. It was the Supremes last Top 20 single and the last to sell over 500,000 copies.

And here we are getting a bit closer to the expected range of numbers for the visible success of ‘Floy Joy’ and others hitting mid-teens in the various US charts. But still too high for a US domestic total I’d say if we again look at what it took to go gold. It is another of the industry’s ways and means of being ‘economical with the truth’, mention a figure and don’t qualify it! After all, not many really care less or give it a moment’s thought…but a global half-million is very realistic.


And later: Diana's last great success in this period came in 1981 with Endless Love, a duet with Lionel Richie. Endless Love, written by Richie, topped the pop charts for 10 weeks and sold over 3 million copies.

I’ve had some fun looking at this one and I’ll put my extra thick anorak on later and explain what I reckon happened with seemingly ‘Endless Love’…!


With respect to Michael Jackson, David Ritz wrote: Considering the theme morbid [[Ben), a few radio stations were initially reluctant to play the single. But public taste prevailed. Ben sold some 1.7 million copies and was nominated for an Academy Award.

I like this total as a gross figure Stateside, or a global number. The period 72-79 was a good one for singles it seems especially as there was so much competition that freebies and over-shipping were expected by all One Stops and Rackjobbers as a matter of course. ‘Well, if you want me to handle this single I’d need a bit more incentive…’ nudge, wink!


With respect to Dancing Machine, it says: He [[Michael) created a classic street dance and before it was over, the single sold two million copies.

What I said above about ‘Ben’ applies in spades here. The two million is obviously too much for a domestic sale unless again the level of free records was three-for-ten, which it could easily be at times in the murky world of the record industry. Once more I’d wonder why Universal/Motown didn’t go for double platinum if it really qualified? And the same for the earlier platinum for ‘Ben’ as it is well known Michael liked to get his due when it came to awards…


David Ritz also writes that one Billboard account says the Miracles's single Love Machine, was the most successful Miracles single of all time.

I don’t think there can be any doubt about that statement for ‘Love Machine’ jobeterob. It only had ‘Tears Of A Clown’ to beat when single sales were not so hot in summer 70 as against early 76.


With respect to Rick James, Scott Galloway wrote: His first single, You and I, was an out of the box smash and established Rick as a platinum selling superstar. In 1981, the stakes were raised when his 5th album, Street Songs, sold over 3 million copies domestically. [[Perhaps that means some of the other figures quoted were not domestic, but worldwide).

And there, as you say, the required qualification is apparent when they say ‘domestically’. It went platinum in July 1981 and was a mega-hit album in the Soul charts, so at the time of its active chart life it probably went over two million [[or close) but as no multi-platinum awards existed until 1984 it had nowhere to go for upgrades. Being an album it would’ve been great on catalogue and revived when CD came around, so after twenty years three million looks fair enough. Albums are simply a no-win to guesstimate without RIAA upgrades.

[Strange]

Motown wasn't a member of the RIAA back in the 60s [[and most of the 70s I believe) otherwise we might have had some solid certifications.

That is correct Florence, and well known in industry and other [[here!) circles. The question has always been why? Clearly it did them no good to declare or else they'd have done it - they didn't need to be members as is often mistakenly thought to be the case.


I don't know exactly how the RIAA verify a claim but I always thought the company submitted the paperwork with "proof". Maybe someone could explain?

The RIAA need to be approached that a single or album has achieved a certification level. They then [[at least prior to the digital age) sent the independent auditors a telex/fax/phone call to get their asses down to the relevant label's place of accounting or whatever and told them to report back. Based on whatever they saw, the rules in force at the time and [[hopefully) with no brown envelopes exchanging hands [[alledgedly), they'd tell the RIAA whether the particular record had indeed shipped what the label said. RIAA would then announce the award, or tell the company it had failed.


I don't know that the RIAA is saying Baby Love didn't sell 1m but rather that they have seen only data to support 500k.

Wasn't Motown's accounting imcomplete and a bit of a shambles and much of it mislaid or lost in later years so that Universal could only claim what hard data they had? The fact that they only submitted claims for 4 singles might point to this.

Indeed, it is conveniently claimed that their accounting was a bit of a shambles. That is one way of looking at it if you have a vested interest in continuing a myth, which after all is what the marketing department was all about in the first place so why destroy your own handywork? I've no doubt that there isn't sufficient paperwork left to certify everything retrospectively, but as usual we have more than enough evidence from the hundreds of other companies who did get involved in the scheme to figure out that what Universal could present the auditors with was complete enough. So yep, they have only seen enough data to support 500k, but not 1m. That is perfectly in tune with the times. Like I said the probability is 950k.


I couldn't make any certain claims as to how many, if any, Supremes' singles sold 1m but I would be surprised if neither You Can't Hurry Love nor Love Child passed the figure.

If you were basing your assumptions on the 1997 certifications it would mean that neither would have sold 500k. There's no way of proving they did, of course, but it would beggar belief.

Unless a lot of false claims were made and downright lies were told there must be at least a dozen Supremes' singles which passed 500k based on the chart performances. Love Child for example was on the Cashbox Chart for nearly 4 months with 3 weeks at #1 and a couple at #2 during the biggest selling period of the year. It wouldn't make sense it didn't even do 500k.

Anyway, I'll get JRT's book out and post what figurres he gives. Many agree with these, then again just as many don't!

Of course neither you or I could make certain claims about the million sellers of the Supremes. It is however perfectly possible to reach some reasoned and logical conclusions which until the proverbial goalposts get moved again with more paperwork found, or something equally unlikely, is all we can do.

It would be a big surprise if any of their No. 1’s didn’t ship out one million copies at the time, so why no awards? You see therein is the clue that tells us again what jobeterob and I have been chewing over – returns. The auditors are charged – as the RIAA website clearly states – with assessing the validity of a certification based on net shipments. Not gross; no exports or cut-outs but net shipments. In 1964 there were just seven RIAA awards for this achievement Florence, and that included four from the Beatles. I’ll say it again, it was a tough order to make it to a gold disc, just like it should be and why the RIAA was founded in 1958 to stop all the crap claims that bedevilled the industry.

So blame Mr. Gordy and his advisors, but frankly it is apparent he knew the awards wouldn’t be forthcoming and so kept the prying eyes at bay. Maybe you think the Beach Boys were also shafted? Plenty of big charting singles but only one – at the time – able to get past one million, while all the while their albums made it. I’d recommend everyone who is really interested in all this stuff to get hold of a copy of ‘The Billboard Book of Gold & Platinum Records’ which was published in 1990 with all the then awards listed. The explanations and rule changes alone should open a few eyes – should if you’re looking without rose-tinted glasses that is!

So yep, the odd lie was told to the trade and media publications and as always it gets perpetuated in biogs and books of hit lists etc. Nothing was really qualified when they said anything, it was left vague and so there could be little come back from stroppy artists or even songwriters wondering where their royalty checks were for these missing millions. They’d be told what was happening then if they raised it.

And that’s how it will stay – it isn’t in Motown’s interest to claim awards that contradict history, is it? I look forward to the JRT figures when you can.

[jobeterob]

Thanks for the replies.

I have the JRT figures at home; but what is interesting about them is that in his updated, complete, new biography of DR, he dropped all of the figures; they were all deleted.

And that has always made me suspicious of them; I read that as he found out the initial figures may be suspect, so he deleted them.

I think they said something like about 6 singles sold one or two million........You Can't Hurry Love, Ain't No Mountain High Enough, maybe Touch Me in the Morning, Where Did Our Love Go, Someday We'll be Together. But not Baby Love, Stop in the Name of Love and quite a few of the other #1's.

[motony]

In the 80's at the Hard Rock Cafe at Universal Studios in Orlando, I was looking at all the memorabelia on the walls & came across a framed RIAA Gold Record of the Motown Yesteryear Series Label 45 of "My Guy" by Mary Wells..this is the Yesteryear Series Not Motown#1056.Needless to say Mary Wells was quite upset because she did not get the gold record NOR the royalties for it. So if that reissue sold a million I wonder what the total would be for Motown#1056.

[reese]

In the 80's at the Hard Rock Cafe at Universal Studios in Orlando, I was looking at all the memorabelia on the walls & came across a framed RIAA Gold Record of the Motown Yesteryear Series Label 45 of "My Guy" by Mary Wells..this is the Yesteryear Series Not Motown#1056.Needless to say Mary Wells was quite upset because she did not get the gold record NOR the royalties for it. So if that reissue sold a million I wonder what the total would be for Motown#1056.

They showed a similar disc on ET when Mary was ill. It might have been a platinum one, as I recall. I wonder if the RIAA just grabbed any copy of the single when they finally made up the disc, as opposed to just that the Yesteryear edition sold a million.

Also, they showed a gold album for her GREATEST HITS album, but the label copy looked as if it was from the 70s or 80s. Did Mary ever get one of those?

[motony]

yes, she did get a platinum framed copy of Greatest Hits in the late 80's[[she would have rather had the money, LOL).

[Strange]

Thanks for the replies.

I have the JRT figures at home; but what is interesting about them is that in his updated, complete, new biography of DR, he dropped all of the figures; they were all deleted.

And that has always made me suspicious of them; I read that as he found out the initial figures may be suspect, so he deleted them.

I think they said something like about 6 singles sold one or two million........You Can't Hurry Love, Ain't No Mountain High Enough, maybe Touch Me in the Morning, Where Did Our Love Go, Someday We'll be Together. But not Baby Love, Stop in the Name of Love and quite a few of the other #1's.

I saw you mention that elsewhere the other week jobeterob. If the numbers get put up by you or Florence I'll be able to comment better, but based on what you're saying about two million totals, and what hopefully the open-minded here have understood about my previous explanations of the sales in the 60s and 70s and how the market was, then it already seems like they were dubious.

Love this stuff too much, must get a life. Lol.

[Strange]

In the 80's at the Hard Rock Cafe at Universal Studios in Orlando, I was looking at all the memorabelia on the walls & came across a framed RIAA Gold Record of the Motown Yesteryear Series Label 45 of "My Guy" by Mary Wells..this is the Yesteryear Series Not Motown#1056.Needless to say Mary Wells was quite upset because she did not get the gold record NOR the royalties for it. So if that reissue sold a million I wonder what the total would be for Motown#1056.

Two explanations motony, either or both are the answer.

1) You or I can pay for an RIAA certification if we want and they'll provide it, but it has to have been certified to come from them and it never was [[so you probably know where this is going...).

2) There is a very good market for, shall we say, 'falsified' RIAA plaques. A bit like the dodgy antiques and art works there are ways to tell but you need to be an expert and have the plaque in your sweaty palms to tell for sure. Basically though, the like the dollar bills in your pocket have an identifying line you would have a unique hologram included on a genuine RIAA award. It is changed from time-to-time and again the experts would know the difference - like a hallmark - to identify the era of production.

You'll have seen a combination of the two I'd say. A bit like old pubs and restaurants have 'genuine' reproductions of old photos and memorabilia to woe/amust the patrons, Hard Rock franchises go the same way.

That again isn't to say 'My Guy' didn't top the million as #1056 - although as I've said before it would be touch-and-go in 1964 - and there would be no doubt it has as a track in its own right over the years. The subject matter, like 'My Girl' too, made it a nice steady seller for young lovers for many years of vinyl reissues. No, I'm not going there!

[florence]

That is correct Florence, and well known in industry and other [[here!) circles. The question has always been why? Clearly it did them no good to declare or else they'd have done it - they didn't need to be members as is often mistakenly thought to be the case.

[QUOTE=florence;80319]I don't know exactly how the RIAA verify a claim but I always thought the company submitted the paperwork with "proof". Maybe someone could explain?

The RIAA need to be approached that a single or album has achieved a certification level. They then [[at least prior to the digital age) sent the independent auditors a telex/fax/phone call to get their asses down to the relevant label's place of accounting or whatever and told them to report back. Based on whatever they saw, the rules in force at the time and [[hopefully) with no brown envelopes exchanging hands [[alledgedly), they'd tell the RIAA whether the particular record had indeed shipped what the label said. RIAA would then announce the award, or tell the company it had failed.



Indeed, it is conveniently claimed that their accounting was a bit of a shambles. That is one way of looking at it if you have a vested interest in continuing a myth, which after all is what the marketing department was all about in the first place so why destroy your own handywork? I've no doubt that there isn't sufficient paperwork left to certify everything retrospectively, but as usual we have more than enough evidence from the hundreds of other companies who did get involved in the scheme to figure out that what Universal could present the auditors with was complete enough. So yep, they have only seen enough data to support 500k, but not 1m. That is perfectly in tune with the times. Like I said the probability is 950k.



Of course neither you or I could make certain claims about the million sellers of the Supremes. It is however perfectly possible to reach some reasoned and logical conclusions which until the proverbial goalposts get moved again with more paperwork found, or something equally unlikely, is all we can do.

It would be a big surprise of any of their No. 1’s didn’t ship out one million copies at the time, so why no awards? You see therein is the clue that tells us again what jobeterob and I have been chewing over – returns. The auditors are charged – as the RIAA website clearly states – with assessing the validity of a certification based on net shipments. Not gross; no exports or cut-outs but net shipments. In 1964 there were just seven RIAA awards for this achievement Florence, and that included four from the Beatles. I’ll say it again, it was a tough order to make it to a gold disc, just like it should be and why the RIAA was founded in 1958 to stop all the crap claims that bedevilled the industry.

So blame Mr. Gordy and his advisors, but frankly it is apparent he knew the awards wouldn’t be forthcoming and so kept the prying eyes at bay. Maybe you think the Beach Boys were also shafted? Plenty of big charting singles but only one – at the time – able to get past one million, while all the while their albums made it. I’d recommend everyone who is really interested in all this stuff to get hold of a copy of ‘The Billboard Book of Gold & Platinum Records’ which was published in 1990 with all the then awards listed. The explanations and rule changes alone should open a few eyes – should if you’re looking without rose-tinted glasses that is!

So yep, the odd lie was told to the trade and media publications and as always it gets perpetuated in biogs and books of hit lists etc. Nothing was really qualified when they said anything, it was left vague and so there could be little come back from stroppy artists or even songwriters wondering where their royalty checks were for these missing millions. They’d be told what was happening then if they raised it.

And that’s how it will stay – it isn’t in Motown’s interest to claim awards that contradict history, is it? I look forward to the JRT figures when you can.


Fascinating stuff and great information.

So am I understanding you right that you believe only the four singles certified by the RIAA in 1997 reached the required level for certification?

I certainly wouldn't argue with total conviction on any singles which reached 1m [[except of course Someday) but - and I admit I cannot offer hard information - I simply cannot believe that some of the other singles did not even sell 500k. Unless the charts were completely screwed up Love Child must be near 1m let alone 500k.

On the face of it if what you say if true there are a lot of music commentators etc who have been mislaid by claims made and obviously don't know as much about the business as they claim to.

However, there is something funny about the certification claims made in 1997. I don't know why Universal would choose those particular singles for certification and not others [[unless documentation was missing which you seem not to think was the case) but why then would they not claim for singles by other artists?

On this basis none if Diana's solo singles before Upside Down sold as many as 500k.

Diana seemed to have a lot of highs and lows but it is beyond belief that her really big hits Ain't No Mountain High Enough, Touch Me In The Morning or Love Hangover didn't even reach the lower certification.

[florence]

Thanks for the replies.

I have the JRT figures at home; but what is interesting about them is that in his updated, complete, new biography of DR, he dropped all of the figures; they were all deleted.

And that has always made me suspicious of them; I read that as he found out the initial figures may be suspect, so he deleted them.

I think they said something like about 6 singles sold one or two million........You Can't Hurry Love, Ain't No Mountain High Enough, maybe Touch Me in the Morning, Where Did Our Love Go, Someday We'll be Together. But not Baby Love, Stop in the Name of Love and quite a few of the other #1's.


Yes, I wondered about that too but we don't know the reason for this. Could it have been legal?

I tried to contact Mr Taborrelli about this but was unable to elicit a response.

[Strange]

That is correct Florence, and well known in industry and other [[here!) circles. The question has always been why? Clearly it did them no good to declare or else they'd have done it - they didn't need to be members as is often mistakenly thought to be the case.

Fascinating stuff and great information.

So am I understanding you right that you believe only the four singles certified by the RIAA in 1997 reached the required level for certification?

I certainly wouldn't argue with total conviction on any singles which reached 1m [[except of course Someday) but - and I admit I cannot offer hard information - I simply cannot believe that some of the other singles did not even sell 500k. Unless the charts were completely screwed up Love Child must be near 1m let alone 500k.

On the face of it if what you say if true there are a lot of music commentators etc who have been mislaid by claims made and obviously don't know as much about the business as they claim to.

However, there is something funny about the certification claims made in 1997. I don't know why Universal would choose those particular singles for certification and not others [[unless documentation was missing which you seem not to think was the case) but why then would they not claim for singles by other artists?

On this basis none if Diana's solo singles before Upside Down sold as many as 500k.

Diana seemed to have a lot of highs and lows but it is beyond belief that her really big hits Ain't No Mountain High Enough, Touch Me In The Morning or Love Hangover didn't even reach the lower certification.

Mmmm… it is hard to sometimes explain reasonably complex points using the written word – for my feeble writing skills anyway – and so maybe from the tone of your reply I haven’t quite made myself clear. This bit was, I hope, straightforward enough?



It would be a big surprise if any of their No. 1’s didn’t ship out one million copies at the time, so why no awards? You see therein is the clue that tells us again what jobeterob and I have been chewing over – returns. The auditors are charged – as the RIAA website clearly states – with assessing the validity of a certification based on net shipments. Not gross; no exports or cut-outs but net shipments.

The seventh word originally being ‘of’ and not ‘if’ might have thrown the sense somewhat and I apologise, but for clarity I’m with you that there were likely more million sellers – at the time - among the No. 1’s. But I reiterate ‘at the time’ Florence and refer back to what the RIAA auditors need to see – net shipments – and the very heavy returns culture that prevailed in the States, especially for singles. That is the clue here, or again perhaps I should say ‘key’ as to why so many awards are missing.


Indeed, it is conveniently claimed that their accounting was a bit of a shambles. That is one way of looking at it if you have a vested interest in continuing a myth, which after all is what the marketing department was all about in the first place so why destroy your own handywork? I've no doubt that there isn't sufficient paperwork left to certify everything retrospectively, but as usual we have more than enough evidence from the hundreds of other companies who did get involved in the scheme to figure out that what Universal could present the auditors with was complete enough. So yep, they have only seen enough data to support 500k, but not 1m. That is perfectly in tune with the times. Like I said the probability is 950k.

As I then went on to say in relation to ‘Baby Love’, but which equally applies to all the other releases whether belatedly awarded or not, the final totals beneath one million would not be worth reporting if the world and its brother thinks all the great hits of the sixties [[not just Motown ones don’t forget) were gold at the time and, as we have seen, felt to be far higher in many instances.

There is undoubtedly missing paperwork for many of the releases as I’ve said above [[at least sufficiently reliable for the auditors to accept), but it isn’t in anyone’s interests to rock the boat now either. What little has emerged is probably about all they had and, again, it fits in with the prevailing difficulty to make gold at all in the years 61-68.

So what Universal did was respond to the other labels who were continuously upgrading the certifications of their major acts. They had no historical background to all of this which possibly explains why they went ahead on the very simple premise of claiming what they could without any ‘baggage’ or inkling as to what they were actually revealing to those who watch these things. What they could get audited they did so; if they were told they needed to show more evidence they went away and found more if they could in 1999 and 2000. We can go with the idea that sales dockets went missing for all sorts of reasons, of course we can, but until we get more upgrades the reality has to be we accept the RIAA auditors did their job and for the records they certified they had a full amount of information.

It’s a shame there isn’t an intermediary award at 750k as that would really help make sense of it all for good, but apart from the special case of ‘My Girl’ the Temptations were all gold until early 1969 with a string of big hits. If one had been platinum it would tell us plenty more that we have almost certain million-sellers for the Supremes’ No. 1’s [[or if ‘Reach Out I’ll Be There’ was certified a belated million-seller), but they weren’t.

So there we are Florence. It looks as if the documentation is mostly ‘missing’ but where it wasn’t they went ahead and requested certifications in all honesty and completeness. As with JRT, something might have happened after the first batch of certs in 1997 to bring the project to a halt…but that’s as far as I’d go with conspiracy theories…

[florence]

So there we are Florence. It looks as if the documentation is mostly ‘missing’ but where it wasn’t they went ahead and requested certifications in all honesty and completeness. As with JRT, something might have happened after the first batch of certs in 1997 to bring the project to a halt…but that’s as far as I’d go with conspiracy theories…


Ah so you do think that there is missing documentation and sales are higher than the four certifications suggest.

Basically we're back at square one - we haven't really a clue exactly how many records The Supremes sold!

I'll just continue to eagerly lap up any info. on The Supremes's sales which comes to light and take all of it with a pinch of salt.

I'll have my own idea of what feels right - and it may or not be!!!!!

[jillfoster]

Mmmm, when I see the word agenda I immediately know I'm in the wrong place for any sensible discussion.



I mean, it don't add up man! Gordy wasn't gonna downplay his acts, that ain't showbiz, but if you ever took time out to really study the industry and its hype across all genres, styles and eras, then you'd grasp that basic fact. Unless you're saying the RIAA were the ones with the problem...?

He could very well down downplay sales in the books in order to get out of paying as much royalties, and he might not have given a damn about official certification, considering the money that had to be paid, and the hoops he would have had to jump through, when all he needed to do was make his own gold record and present it in some media outlet... like what happened when Jean, Mary, and Cindy were presented with gold records for "Nathan Jones" on the Merv Griffin show in January of 1972.

[smark21]

Ah so you do think that there is missing documentation and sales are higher than the four certifications suggest.

Basically we're back at square one - we haven't really a clue exactly how many records The Supremes sold!

I'll just continue to eagerly lap up any info. on The Supremes's sales which comes to light and take all of it with a pinch of salt.

I'll have my own idea of what feels right - and it may or not be!!!!!

I think taking it with a pinch of salt is the best idea. Just enjoy the songs and be glad the Supremes and Motown in general sold enough and made music that created a die hard fan base to warrant re-issues, deluxe editions and the mining of the vaults. In the end, does it really matter [[unless you're the artist or songwriter) if Stoned Love sold 5million or 321,659 copies? No.

[Jimi LaLumia]

let's just say that if "Nathan Jones" warranted a Gold Record award from Motown on television,then "Stoned Love" was most likely platinum as it was a much,MUCH bigger hit than "Nathan" was..

[jobeterob]

And Smark..........the purpose of this thread, as stated by someone up above somewhere, was to ensure [[ I mean ENSURE) that some Supremes record outsold all the records Diana Ross was on!

Flo's analysis is good..........no one has a clue what got sold; and Smark is right..........it might be interesting and even vital to some, but it's a pinch of salt. I think it's very interesting, lots of fun and we are fortunate Flo and Strange showed up on SD. They are great.

What is a shame is the stories from an endless list of singers..........about the money gone, the crowds gone, the loans needed, the facebook pages flogging gigs anywhere and what I have found most disturbing is the pleas for money from family and friends for funerals and memorials. I still feel the artist was more responsible for that than Motown. But it's very sad when it comes to that.

[Penny]

I just can't sleep until we have an answer to these sales questions!:cool:

Penny

[Jimi LaLumia]

can't sleep?; listen to "Reach Out and Touch"....zzzzzzzzzzzzzz

[captainjames]

Just one question~~~ Wouldn't Mr. Gordy had to report this income of sales to the IRS ? or are we thinking he lied on his income taxes as well ? Just a thought.

[jobeterob]

Yes, but Motown Record Corporation and Jobete and other entities would pay Berry Gordy and others wages and dividends............and he would report those. It wouldn't have shown that certain records sold certain amounts.

Motown Record Corporation would have filed a corporate tax return showing income less expenses but there would be no reference to sales of individual records.

[florence]

I just can't sleep until we have an answer to these sales questions!:cool:

Penny

Penny, prepare to never have another minute's sleep!

[florence]

Yes, but Motown Record Corporation and Jobete and other entities would pay Berry Gordy and others wages and dividends............and he would report those. It wouldn't have shown that certain records sold certain amounts.

Motown Record Corporation would have filed a corporate tax return showing income less expenses but there would be no reference to sales of individual records.

Wasn't there a volume of something like 10,000 pages produced which detailed a lot of Motown sales which was used in some business case involving Michael Jackson in Detroit around 1990 which was brought into Court?

I wonder would this be a matter of public interest and be available to view if requested?

If I thought so I would even take a holiday in Detroit!!

[captainjames]

Hey
Rob thanks for that bit of info I am sure that somewhere it is itemized by number [[not necessarily the title) for each one of those recordings. It is apparent that he probably recorded it under the girls names but, we all know how that turned out.


Yes, but Motown Record Corporation and Jobete and other entities would pay Berry Gordy and others wages and dividends............and he would report those. It wouldn't have shown that certain records sold certain amounts.

Motown Record Corporation would have filed a corporate tax return showing income less expenses but there would be no reference to sales of individual records.

[jobeterob]

I'm sure one of the authors of some Motown book did use some of the documentation submitted in Court for the HDH suit...........maybe it was Peter Benajminson; maybe it was Posner; maybe Randy. I'm not sure how available any of it is after all these years and there are generally costs to search it. I don't believe any of it is available on line. Some of it might be sealed and unavailable.

Who lives in Detroit? Wayne County? They could call and ask. I know one of those books printed a copy of the Statement of Claim or the Writ.

And perhaps some of these other suits might reveal something; from what I've heard and read, none of the suits go very far before there is some settlement.

[Jimi LaLumia]

Wayne County does NOT live in Detroit,and these days, she is Jayne County!!!

http://music.aol.com/artist/jayne-county?flv=1

[jillfoster]

let's just say that if "Nathan Jones" warranted a Gold Record award from Motown on television,then "Stoned Love" was most likely platinum as it was a much,MUCH bigger hit than "Nathan" was..

i'm assuming you know that platinum didn't exist until 1976.

[Jimi LaLumia]

correct, but then, in the Motown universe, does that matters?...lol

[Strange]

Ah so you do think that there is missing documentation and sales are higher than the four certifications suggest.

Basically we're back at square one - we haven't really a clue exactly how many records The Supremes sold!

I'll just continue to eagerly lap up any info. on The Supremes's sales which comes to light and take all of it with a pinch of salt.

I'll have my own idea of what feels right - and it may or not be!!!!!

Overlooked this post Florence, sorry.

Yep, there is obviously missing documentation, that is a no-brainer! It don't put as back at square one at all though as the certs that have been awarded are fully justifiable and fit perfectly with the numbers that were REALLY being sold/shipped in the sixties. The reality is one million copies was only achievable by anyone other than the Beatles [[and even they didn't manage it every time!) if freebies were included and before returns hit.

It would be perfectly acceptable to believe each of the Supremes No. 1 hits merited a gold disc [[or a modern platinum) in theory and had Mr. Gordy been willing to open the books to the auditors at the time I don't doubt that would have happened. All that has happened since is based on the paperwork that did survive for those releases Universal deemed it worthwhile presenting to the RIAA auditors in 97 and 99 etc, or had gotten around to. And clearly these releases - if we assume, as I do, that the original shipments were over one million gross - went back below the seven-figure level.

This applies to everyone, and isn't Supremes-centric. The sad thing is Motown didn't join the scheme until 1981 or so. I'm sure what you feel is or isn't right will actually be pretty shrewd in the end.

[Strange]

He could very well down downplay sales in the books in order to get out of paying as much royalties, and he might not have given a damn about official certification, considering the money that had to be paid, and the hoops he would have had to jump through, when all he needed to do was make his own gold record and present it in some media outlet... like what happened when Jean, Mary, and Cindy were presented with gold records for "Nathan Jones" on the Merv Griffin show in January of 1972.

I don't believe Gordy and his associates could hide the figures and not pay the contractual royalties. It all has to go through the books. The contracts were lousy, as they were for many other acts and professions. Look how boxers got ripped off!

No, it was obvious to all within the industry that Motown wanted to promote their own successes and not have any independent outfit like the RIAA come in and nit-pick about what they were claiming. Gold records and awards of that nature were good publicity and media events - as you point out about Nathan Jones for instance. It was why the RIAA scheme was set up because there were so many bogus claims in the 50s that the whole thing was devalued in the eyes of the public.

'In-house' awards, as they were called, were always a publicity tool, Motown, probably with good reason as they were just starting out, wanted to blow their own trumpet and in many cases they were probably fully justified. But we'll never know exactly which were 'genuine' million-sellers and which weren't now - except for those few Universal awards that slipped out before someone realised that it was running contrary to the 'story' that had been told originally.

[Strange]

And Smark..........the purpose of this thread, as stated by someone up above somewhere, was to ensure [[ I mean ENSURE) that some Supremes record outsold all the records Diana Ross was on!

Flo's analysis is good..........no one has a clue what got sold; and Smark is right..........it might be interesting and even vital to some, but it's a pinch of salt. I think it's very interesting, lots of fun and we are fortunate Flo and Strange showed up on SD. They are great.

What is a shame is the stories from an endless list of singers..........about the money gone, the crowds gone, the loans needed, the facebook pages flogging gigs anywhere and what I have found most disturbing is the pleas for money from family and friends for funerals and memorials. I still feel the artist was more responsible for that than Motown. But it's very sad when it comes to that.

Thanks for those kind words jobeterob. You and Flo are intrinsically right about it all being taken with a pinch of salt, but I do take issue with the idea that no-one has a clue what got sold. We have, as I've mentioned before, plenty of contemporary and subsequent evidence of shipments and sales awards from the RIAA across all acts to make very good judgements as to the likely sales ranges of the big hits. And then there are the various hit parades that were - for all their faults and foibles and radio airplay factors - pretty accurate on the whole at the top end where these million-sellers obviously inhabit.

As long as we way up everything equally and even-handedly, throw in some other bona-fide data that has come to light from record company leaks and the like [[that can be trusted!), then it is easy to arrive at a fair guestimate of the overall success of all the major singles acts in total, and reasonably so per release.

Some of us have a better advantage with access to more information than others [[Hotspurman is one it seems), but providing we are truthful and don't cheat by rationalising upwards for our own personal likes and downwards for our dislikes - not that easy mind you! - then it is possible.

[Strange]

Yes, but Motown Record Corporation and Jobete and other entities would pay Berry Gordy and others wages and dividends............and he would report those. It wouldn't have shown that certain records sold certain amounts.

Motown Record Corporation would have filed a corporate tax return showing income less expenses but there would be no reference to sales of individual records.

Exactly right jobeterob. The Corporation is entirely separate for tax purposes and no IRS official would care less what each record sold. They would only be interested in the earnings and how they are made up, and in a business like that it will be rather complex!

Where the facts and figures would be reported would be to the music publishers [[who represent the songwriters), and the artist management. As so much was kept within Motown there was plenty of room for crafty, some might say dodgy, dealings. But make no mistake everyone, the paper trail will always have been clear as to the number of records pressed and issued from the contracted factories and also all the returns and other side-deals for freebies will also have been carefully noted.

What has happened to the Motown artists is no different to many others in the preceeding decades. They were taken advantage of, in much the same way that big business always has and still does [[anyone joining the Wall Street camps?). All I'm saying is that no matter how sneaky Motown were at the time in the end they couldn't hide the bigger picture as painted by Billboard, RIAA or what has come out over the years concerning other acts of the era as to what they must've been selling.

And it seems in almost all cases the numbers - surprise, surprise - were hyped up to be bigger than they actually were presented or thought to have been.

[Strange]

I'm sure one of the authors of some Motown book did use some of the documentation submitted in Court for the HDH suit...........maybe it was Peter Benajminson; maybe it was Posner; maybe Randy. I'm not sure how available any of it is after all these years and there are generally costs to search it. I don't believe any of it is available on line. Some of it might be sealed and unavailable.

Who lives in Detroit? Wayne County? They could call and ask. I know one of those books printed a copy of the Statement of Claim or the Writ.

And perhaps some of these other suits might reveal something; from what I've heard and read, none of the suits go very far before there is some settlement.

Not sure of these particular suits jobeterob, but again many cases that have been fought over the years have been reported and numbers come out that in the round tell us again that the figures were lower than generally believed. The same will apply to Motown, and mostly the settlements are to perpetuate the myths as much as squabble over the pennies. The 'brand' is worth more.

For instance, take the Beatles many cases with Capitol. Information has come out about their sales as a result and - unless we're really in denial - we must accept they are the biggest band from the 60s and so everyone else must have sold fewer, no? Well much of what happened to them prior to 1966 involved the use of freebies to avoid royalties, and for sure Motown would've played that card bigtime. It is little known, but freebies were discounted by the RIAA until late 1965, so obviously Gordy would have had no intention of bringing in the auditors only to have them say, "ok, we found 1.2m shipments but 400k were free so no gold".

These freebie records were obviously to keep the acts from earning what they should've and also to attract the One Stop accounts Motown needed 'on-side' in the early days.

[Strange]

I actually misquoted the Hitsville Motown 1972 - 1992 booklet when I referred to 3 million copies of Stoned Love being sold.

And later: Diana's last great success in this period came in 1981 with Endless Love, a duet with Lionel Richie. Endless Love, written by Richie, topped the pop charts for 10 weeks and sold over 3 million copies.


Finally got back to this jobeterob, which should bring the curtain down on all those fanciful ideas on here about 'Stoned Love' selling three million. Here are some observations about the Ross/Richie smash.

Once more we can only go by what we know, and ‘Endless Love’ was not a triple platinum or anything in those Universal RIAA certifications in the late 90s of dozens of Motown hits, and surely it must have been tempting to upgrade it if it was a genuine claim? As it seems they could go back to 1962 – the Marvelettes and ‘Please Mr. Postman’ – with satisfactory shipment info for their retrospective award applications, it is hard to believe that the 1980s paperwork was lost for ‘Endless Love’. That is all down to how you view these things; I am somewhat cynical and confess to knowing that the labels like to keep the urban myth numbers out there, and so don’t want to mess with a good story. If three million is the accepted wisdom for ‘Endless Love’ [[kinda kicks that figure into a cocked hat for ‘Stoned Love’ again btw), let’s leave well alone was probably their thinking. After all, it already had a platinum award which at the time represented two million shipments if you recall.

So why didn’t they take the opportunity to upgrade to double platinum, especially as the retrospective awards were being allowed on the new levels in force since Jan 1 1989? Again we have clues if we look for them hard enough. The single originally hit gold [[don’t forget this was for a million shipments then, and definitely not retail sales) on 21st August 1981, a week or so after it was first on top of the Hot 100 on 15/8/81. As I say this is no science, but quite obviously the shipments are always way ahead of the demand, while at the same time the chart is reflecting an earlier period than the published date. It is hard to get one’s head around, but realistically the record had been the nation’s top selling single since about August 3, and if you then understand that similarly the shipment passing a million likely covered the same length of foreward demand period, then the chart that truly reflects when it went through the one million shipment barrier isn’t until the Hot 100 published 5th September – by which time it had been No. 1 for a month and realistically for longer.

If you’ve followed this in the badly-phrased way I’ve worded it you’ve done amazingly! If you have then basically you should see that we have a good idea that it needed about half of the time ‘Endless Love’ was No. 1 for it to really be bought by one million people. But as we know it was [[sickeningly?) popular and remained on top for as long again, finally being dethroned on 17th October 1981, after nine long weeks at the summit [[not ten as the Hitsville booklet wrongly stated), by the equally sacharine ‘Arthur’s Theme’ by Christopher Cross. Now the interesting part is the RIAA platinum award for two million shipments was announced just a day before on 16th October, which as before really takes us up to the end of the month in chart representation terms, by which time it was getting ready to slip down to No. 5 and its last week in the Top Ten.

Now another fact that isn’t readily appreciated is how once a record starts to slip down the charts it in fact generally becomes a net loser for the label. In other words the returns outweigh the remaining demand as dealers and public alike move on to the next smasheroo. So all the evidence indicates that Motown were keen to achieve the platinum feat – and indeed why not? – but it really was a case of stumbling over the line. The returns over the following weeks didn’t mean the award wasn’t won genuinely but it completely explains why there was no attempt to increase to triple platinum by Universal in the late 90s, nor even to re-confirm the double platinum that it looked on the face of it could have been granted.

By way of a contemporary note, it should be noted the charts and single sales had slowed and stagnated after the late seventies madness. There were a fair number of long residencies at the top of the Hot 100 and yet only one other managed platinum for two million, the media-frenzy inducing ‘Physical’ by ONJ. Now that DID stick around for ten weeks on top of the Hot 100, and did so throughout the aforementioned Xmas period for peak consumer buying. This monster still only shipped its two millionth copy on 5th January 1982, having been at No. 1 since November 21, so as I’ve said before two million is in itself a really big deal in US singles history. Oh, and that Chris Cross ‘Arthur’s Theme’ didn’t ship a million for gold until 7th January 1982!

All of which underscores the logical conclusion that ‘Endless Love’ never sold three million in the US, and therefore the only valid conclusion jobeterob is yours that the figure can only be global.

[Jimi LaLumia]

well, if all these records sold only 100,000 each, how did Mr. Gordy manage to build his castles everywhere and pay off all those radio guys to not play the Florence Ballard singles?.......from live performances/shows revenue?..where was the empire building money coming from?

[tomato tom]

Very interesting..Thanks for the very interesting comments..Paulo xxx

[Penny]

Would someone please, please, please give us answer to these question. I need to sleep.

I also need to get out on my route and make some deliveries.

Penny;)

[Roberta75]

well, if all these records sold only 100,000 each, how did Mr. Gordy manage to build his castles everywhere and pay off all those radio guys to not play the Florence Ballard singles?.......from live performances/shows revenue?..where was the empire building money coming from?

I highly doubt that Berry Gordy payed radio stations not to play Florence Ballard records. Your statement is paranoid, false and probably libelous.

Roberta

[Jimi LaLumia]

I didn't say that I believe these things, these are things that I've read...young lady!...lol
but I'm still curious, where was the money coming from if record sales were so meager...

[Strange]

Well Roberta75, I guess JimiLaLumia isn't a great stats guy either as no-one is saying 100,000 each! I reckon [[hope?) it's all tongue-in-cheek...

Basically the US record industry is full of bull*hit and we have been misled by labels, managers and media [[and still are of course) with all manner of record sales hype and dollars earnt crap. It makes for good copy, and let's face it only saddos like me bother with the detail, and then we expect to get shouted down for our troubles.

I feel sorry for that Galileo who kept telling them Europeans 400-odd years ago that the world wasn't flat but round...not sure if he got set light to for his troubles or not. Gulp.

So whether its Elvis' or the Beatles' fans who are adamant that 'It's Now Or Never' or 'I Want To Hold Your Hand' both shifted five million in the States, or Motown admirers with their daydreams, the truth is that all are in cloud cuckoo land.

But hey, it don't ultimately matter much, and that big old [[round) world of ours will keep on turning whatever you choose to believe. But you'd be better of in this instance to believe me. Lol.

[Roberta75]

I didn't say that I believe these things, these are things that I've read...young lady!...lol
but I'm still curious, where was the money coming from if record sales were so meager...

Well you certainly seem to have more than a bit of an obsession with Berry Gordy's "castles" as you call them.

[Strange]

Anyway, I'll get JRT's book out and post what figurres he gives. Many agree with these, then again just as many don't!

Hi again Florence, over here now! It seems you did have the book and intended to put the numbers up. Is it still possible if not too much trouble - or maybe a link to where else they might be checked out...?

[florence]

Hi again Florence, over here now! It seems you did have the book and intended to put the numbers up. Is it still possible if not too much trouble - or maybe a link to where else they might be checked out...?

Since you ask I will get the figures for you, Strange although it may be a few days as I'm particularly busy at the minute.

I had decided not to bother because in the long run it's not going to throw any light on the matter.

The whole Supremes' sales controversy is even more in the quagmire now.

I found your information on the 60s sales very enlightening and it looks probable that their sales are not as big as many think - Joseph Murrell's seems to have been quite gullible!!! I always knew about returns but wouldn't have thought they would have been to such an extent.

Certainly the list that was posted on Answerbag with Baby Love at 3.5m, My World Is Empty at 1m+ etc looks utter rubbish but then.......................

I did wonder if my information that when the certification levels were lowered even records released before that date could be certified under the new criteria was wrong but then you would have picked that up and I have re-confirmed it.

It would have explained why despite some claims that Where Did Our Love Go outsold Baby Love it eventually got certified. If WDOLG shipped 1m+ but then had enormous returns dealers would not have taken as many copies of BL so it didn't ship as many but then didn't have big returns and so actually sold more. However, I digress, this is hypothetical.

It would seem that Universal started first with the Diana Supremes and either there was a lot of documentation missing or the records just didn't sell the required numbers but there were only a handful of certifications.

Then when they moved on to The Temptations a large slice of their catalogue did receive awards. But why would they have the documentation for the Temptations and not The Supremes?

It would seem then that they decided not to go any further with claiming back certifications which would affect Stoned Love or Diana's solo biggies if they sold the required amount. One million is debatable but it would be hard to believe for example Touch Me In The Morning didn't do at least 500k.

The Supremes' singles raced to the top of the charts but then dropped quickly too which can be deceptive, records which rise and fall slowly and linger in the upper regions of the chart without going right to the top can be bigger sellers. So maybe a lot of their singles didn't do 1m net but it is hard ro believe that many of them would not have done 500k. I always go back to Love Child.

Anyway, I don't think it will make anything clearer but I will get the figures shortly.


Still looking at Stoned Love and I see your logic but there is something amiss there. A couple of UK chart watchers I have contacted so far are with the higher figure.

[jillfoster]

Florence, I agree... many times there is no correlation between peak chart positions and sales. Take a non-Supremes example: Ted Nugent's album "Scream Dream" peaked at number 13 on the billboard album chart, and has been certified gold..... the album "Cat Scratch Fever" only topped out at number 17... 4 positions lower, but has been certified TRIPLE PLATINUM. Just some food for thought, and a random comparison.

[Strange]

Florence, I agree... many times there is no correlation between peak chart positions and sales. Take a non-Supremes example: Ted Nugent's album "Scream Dream" peaked at number 13 on the billboard album chart, and has been certified gold..... the album "Cat Scratch Fever" only topped out at number 17... 4 positions lower, but has been certified TRIPLE PLATINUM. Just some food for thought, and a random comparison.

Jill - we are not talking about albums. They have a completely different shelf-life and sales spectrum, not to mention their market simply grew and grew over the years under discussion.

For singles, if you really have a thorough knowledge of all the variations such as era, seasonality, popularity etc., and a good sprinkling of trustworthy sales reports, industry sales data and awards information, then it is very possible to set some realistic sales parameters based on chart achievements for the biggest hits. Certainly Top 10 and above, and probably Top 20 and below too. Even the RIAA have big gaps between awards and then will have us believe that tallying all those up can not only provide onlookers with an acts total sales but even rank them against others.

It's semi-serious fun; it isn't a science as I've said before, but then what is? [[Lol, apart from science! Anyone know what the God Particle is yet? Ha.)

[roger]

Still looking at Stoned Love and I see your logic but there is something amiss there. A couple of UK chart watchers I have contacted so far are with the higher figure.

Florence .. being a "UK Chart Watcher" of sorts I can easily believe the higher US figures because I can compare them with their UK sales. This is on one assumption and two known facts.

I "assume" that the UK sales figures that I have seen for the various Motown hits, such as those in your "30 biggest selling UK Motown singles" thread are reasonably correct, as the UK charts were always sales based and so "rough" sales figures would be known from the data used to compile the British charts.

I "know" that back in the mid-late '60s the population of the US was approximately four times that of the UK [[around 50 Million in the UK and 200 million in the US) and I also "know" that in the '60s wages etc. were significantly higher in the US than in the UK and so there was a lot more disposable income around in the US than in the UK.

The Top 30 selling UK Motown singles list has "Baby Love" selling 500000 copies in the UK .. though this may include some sales from the 1974 reissue. The 1964 UK chart run of "Baby Love" seems very similar to its US Billboard "Hot 100" run .. in the UK "Baby Love" spent fifteen weeks on the chart with two of those at number one, in the US "Baby Love spent thirteen weeks on the "Hot 100" with four of those at number one.

The UK figure of 500000 sales for "Baby Love" seem totally in line to me with reported sales of other UK #1 hits in that 1964/5 period, and even if it does include the 1974 reissue that would still indicate to me that the 1964 UK release sold 400000.

So .. I don't find it hard to believe that "Baby Love" might have sold 3 Million in the US in 1964 if, with a similar chart run in Britain, it managed to sell 400000 at the same time .. If I take the lower UK figure of 400000, multiply that by four [[to take in account the difference in US/UK population) and then add 50% to take into account differences in disposable income it comes out as 2.4 Million .. if I take the higher UK figure of 500000 and do the same it actually does come out as 3 Million.

Roger

[Strange]

Since you ask I will get the figures for you, Strange although it may be a few days as I'm particularly busy at the minute.

I had decided not to bother because in the long run it's not going to throw any light on the matter.

The whole Supremes' sales controversy is even more in the quagmire now.

I found your information on the 60s sales very enlightening and it looks probable that their sales are not as big as many think - Joseph Murrell's seems to have been quite gullible!!! I always knew about returns but wouldn't have thought they would have been to such an extent.

Please do bother Florence! Any and all figures should be given an airing, they are very often suspect and come with an 'agenda', but not always and in that regard I feel JRT's numbers can be considered. He does have some credentials/contacts, even though he is also a possible 'puppet' too. The comments about Joseph Murrels are a case in point. His work on the original 'Book of Golden Discs' is imho the chart and sales hobbyist's 'bible', and yet as you point out it is shown to be flawed in many respects.

It doesn't make him gullible I don't think, because when he worked and collated all this info [[the 40s, 50s and 60s mainly) he was no more than a journalist with contacts too - and there was no internet don't forget. What he put together was astonishing and held sway for years [[in some fan-centric quarters it still does/will), and only the likes of you and me can maybe spot the problems in what he reported. Don't forget also that all his material was gleaned from the trade papers and record company press releases; he could only do so much with what he had.

As for the Supremes quagmire, well that isn't the case at all providing a dose of realism is applied.


Certainly the list that was posted on Answerbag with Baby Love at 3.5m, My World Is Empty at 1m+ etc looks utter rubbish but then.......................

I did wonder if my information that when the certification levels were lowered even records released before that date could be certified under the new criteria was wrong but then you would have picked that up and I have re-confirmed it.

It would have explained why despite some claims that Where Did Our Love Go outsold Baby Love it eventually got certified. If WDOLG shipped 1m+ but then had enormous returns dealers would not have taken as many copies of BL so it didn't ship as many but then didn't have big returns and so actually sold more. However, I digress, this is hypothetical.

The Answerbag list is rubbish, no need to equivocate about it imho. Trust me, there is no other answer save a conspiracy theory concerning such malpractice and involving so many people that it would be right up there with the JFK and Moon-landing cover-ups!

And yes, the RIAA awards are now retrospective since that reduction in criteria at 1/1/89 to 500k shipment for gold and re-naming the million shipment as platinum. We had so many upgrades and re-certs from all the labels that it is again quite easy to work through them all and see what the original shipment patterns vis-a-vis the charts and different eras/seasons etc. must have been. Within reason. Some issues as you say could be 'hypothetical', but we aren't [[or shouldn't be) trying to tie things down to the 'nth degree, but we can make very good educated guesses about 'Baby Love' and WDOLG. It is a pain that Motown didn't want to have independent RIAA auditers look at their books - but plenty of companies/labels did and as I pointed out there were still only seven confirmed million-unit shipments in the whole of 1964 and four of those were the Beatles! It is pretty clear to me that 'Baby Love' has been correctly certified at over 500k and beneath 1m. Anyone else thinking otherwise needs to open the book of conspiracy theories again!



It would seem that Universal started first with the Diana Supremes and either there was a lot of documentation missing or the records just didn't sell the required numbers but there were only a handful of certifications.

Then when they moved on to The Temptations a large slice of their catalogue did receive awards. But why would they have the documentation for the Temptations and not The Supremes?

It would seem then that they decided not to go any further with claiming back certifications which would affect Stoned Love or Diana's solo biggies if they sold the required amount. One million is debatable but it would be hard to believe for example Touch Me In The Morning didn't do at least 500k.

The Supremes' singles raced to the top of the charts but then dropped quickly too which can be deceptive, records which rise and fall slowly and linger in the upper regions of the chart without going right to the top can be bigger sellers. So maybe a lot of their singles didn't do 1m net but it is hard ro believe that many of them would not have done 500k. I always go back to Love Child.

Anyway, I don't think it will make anything clearer but I will get the figures shortly.


Still looking at Stoned Love and I see your logic but there is something amiss there. A couple of UK chart watchers I have contacted so far are with the higher figure.

As for the order of the retrospective Universal certs, you may well be right that they went backwards. I'm less interested in that than the certs themselves that did make it and the level the reached; when compared with the Columbia re-cert programme on singles for instance, or those of other labels, we can easily see that the idea of incomplete or 'missing' paperwork isn't necessarily watertight. Anyway, as you say, there should have been plenty of golds for 500k for sure - including TMITM - and for whatever reason they pulled the plug on the whole shooting match.

If someone would like to pop in here and say why they believe Stoned Love is that higher 355k figure, it would maybe make it more interesting for everyone...

[Strange]

Florence .. being a "UK Chart Watcher" of sorts I can easily believe the higher US figures because I can compare them with their UK sales. This is on one assumption and two known facts.

I "assume" that the UK sales figures that I have seen for the various Motown hits, such as those in your "30 biggest selling UK Motown singles" thread are reasonably correct, as the UK charts were always sales based and so "rough" sales figures would be known from the data used to compile the British charts.

I "know" that back in the mid-late '60s the population of the US was approximately four times that of the UK [[around 50 Million in the UK and 200 million in the US) and I also "know" that in the '60s wages etc. were significantly higher in the US than in the UK and so there was a lot more disposable income around in the US than in the UK.

The Top 30 selling UK Motown singles list has "Baby Love" selling 500000 copies in the UK .. though this may include some sales from the 1974 reissue. The 1964 UK chart run of "Baby Love" seems very similar to its US Billboard "Hot 100" run .. in the UK "Baby Love" spent fifteen weeks on the chart with two of those at number one, in the US "Baby Love spent thirteen weeks on the "Hot 100" with four of those at number one.

The UK figure of 500000 sales for "Baby Love" seem totally in line to me with reported sales of other UK #1 hits in that 1964/5 period, and even if it does include the 1974 reissue that would still indicate to me that the 1964 UK release sold 400000.

So .. I don't find it hard to believe that "Baby Love" might have sold 3 Million in the US in 1964 if, with a similar chart run in Britain, it managed to sell 400000 at the same time .. If I take the lower UK figure of 400000, multiply that by four [[to take in account the difference in US/UK population) and then add 50% to take into account differences in disposable income it comes out as 2.4 Million .. if I take the higher UK figure of 500000 and do the same it actually does come out as 3 Million.

Roger

It is interesting how easy it is for people to fall into the population ratios and proportionality traps when attempting to estimate sales around the world. I was that man once too, so I can perfectly understand how you've rationalised things here Roger.

On the face of it your basic numbers are correct and the arithmetic is faultless - but one key ingredient is missing that I gave particular attention to in an earlier post on the Top 30 Motown UK Singles thread - the actual shipment data of singles. This was what I said then - ironically in response to your own correct observation about British silver discs - in post number 76:


Thanks Roger, nothing like the actual stats to underline the realities! In the late sixties and on into 1972 – with the usual exception to prove the rule – single sales were indeed very flat compared with 63/4. But then again, most comparisons with the Beatles/Merseybeat explosion would look poor!

The actual 45-rpm record production figures for 1964 were 72,841,000 against 46,618,000 in 1969. But as always, an understanding of what the numbers mean and refer to is equally as important in all of this [[a bit like the Republicans or Democrats explaining the same sets of figures differently and the non-partisan commentators actually interpreting them for what they are!).


Now of course that is only half the story, and taking your population proportion/ratio theory we would actually expect US single unit shipments to be approaching 300m, but in fact the RIAA estimate for 1964 is just 99m!

As I say, your calculations on the face of things look fine to the layman, but the reality is that the market for singles in the States had been steadily declining since 1958, whereas the opposite was true in the UK. The Beatles/Merseybeat inspired boom was truly astonishing. Why, well apart from a traditional love of the single in Britain it is probably your observation about relative wealth of the two nations that explains it; the Brits simply couldn't afford an album whereas the more affluent Americans were able to spend more of their disposable income on the 33rpm.

This doesn't mean proportionality and ratios can work based on the unit production and shipment data of any given time, of course it doesn't [[and I explained part of the difficulties later in that post I refer to if you missed it or care to revisit it). But it is the most important detail when considering the various factors at play in the general overview of the relative market sizes.

As I say, I also fell for the population comparative argument for many years until studying statistical principles made me realise the error of my ways. Another way of looking at it for a country as vast as the States is to look at regional or local stats [[again, as I erroneously once did) and then extrapolate upwards for a national figure. So say a Billboard report said a single shipped 75k in Chicago, well in my youthful mind I checked the population of greater Chicago and worked up to a US-wide possible total.

Blimey, did I have some multi-platinum sellers by the time I was finished! And I believed it made perfect sense too...

[motony]

I still say that singles sales did not start declining in favor of LPS until 1968 not 1958 in the USA.Motown was the number 1 label in singles sales in the 60's.This was the word from Schwartz Bros. distributors[[one of the biggest in the NE) and Tone Distributors[[one of the biggest if not the biggest in the SE).

[Strange]

I still say that singles sales did not start declining in favor of LPS until 1968 not 1958 in the USA.Motown was the number 1 label in singles sales in the 60's.This was the word from Schwartz Bros. distributors[[one of the biggest in the NE) and Tone Distributors[[one of the biggest if not the biggest in the SE).

Well motony, you are quite right, that singles sales hadn't declined below album & tape sales until 1968. I confirmed this particular statistical breakthrough in another post the other day was in the last quarter of 1967 I recall.

But that is not at issue here. The 'declining' that is of note in this discussion is that of singles as a whole in the US compared with the UK, and as an aside the reason for the decrease in the singles/album sales ratio of the two countries was probably the greater wealth enjoyed in the States to be able to buy more LPs than the still relatively impoverished [[due to WWII) British.

As for the Motown label being the No. 1 singles label in the States, that isn't at issue either. Again I mentioned the other day that it wasn't so much the individual sales that caused this as the greater percentage of hits from the number of releases. On average a label is pleased with a ratio [[yes, it is good to use this here!) of one Top 100 success out of 13 or so releases. Motown at their peak were able - because of superb A&R, writing and production control to achieve a 1:4 home run conversion rate. Possibly even better at certain peak times!

The roster of star names and hit singles makes the distributor claims pretty obvious to me and you, if not to the layman. By comparison, take away Elvis from RCA and the Beatles from Capitol and what have you got? Not a lot really [[I know, Beach Boys and, err, the Guess Who...?! respectively). Let's be serious!

But that again isn't the issue - the issue is the multi-million sellers that just weren't.

[roger]

A very interesting post there Strange [[Your Post #190).

I'd be very interested to know where I can find the stated cumulative figure for U.S. singles sales in 1964 of just 99 Million.

To me this figure seems astonishingly low, especially set against the U.K. figure you state of just under 73 Million [[which is close to my guestimate of 80 Million).

I would have thought that U.S. singles sales in this period would have been much higher and I've been busy googling trying to find some clues.

The nearest I've come to any success is an article I've found about Japanese Sales in Billboard, dated 19th December 1970.

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=mSkEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA39&lpg=PA39&dq=us+record+single+1964+billboard+total+productio n+japan&source=bl&ots=vJ4hXi2VT2&sig=z1gATkaS0EincO1T5qZrUR5iplE&hl=en&sa=X&ei=jcHpToq5Dc724QTygoCRCQ&sqi=2&ved=0CDMQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q&f=false

In this it states that in 1969 "singles sales in Japan were 0.7 units per capita, whereas in the U.S. and U.K. they were about 1.0.

So, if Billboard in 1970 is to believed the total sales of singles in the U.S. in 1969 were around the 200 Million figure and in the U.K. they were around the 50 Million mark.

This seems broadly speaking correct with the U.K. figures you quote of between 46 and 47 Million, so it seems logical to assume their U.S. estimate is correct as well.

However, something seems wrong here as this 1969 U.S. figure is double the amount you state as being the total for 1964, yet the consensus of opinion is that in 1960s America they were in steady decline! Are we all wrong?

I also found this interesting article on the breaking of THE BEATLES in the U.S. which occurred in 1964 ..

http://www.pophistorydig.com/?p=3421

An interesting comments in this is that ..

"They [[The Beatles) had 15 separate recordings in 1964 - nine singles and six albums - that each sold 1 million or more copies, representing total Beatle sales in the U.S. that one year of more than 25 million copies".

Which means that at the absolute minimum THE BEATLES sold 9 Million singles in 1964, and as the article states figures for "I Want To Hold Your Hand" as 3.4 Million by the end of March, with "Can't Buy Me Love" selling 2.1 Million at that time it looks like the cumulative total for Beatles singles sold in the U.S. in 1964 is much higher.

It doesn't leave much for everyone else does it, though the article does state that in the first quarter of 1964 THE BEATLES accounted for a staggering 60% of U.S. record sales.

One BEATLES record that could give a pointer to the sales of "Baby Love" is THE BEATLES last hit prior to "Baby Love" .. "A Hard Day's Night" which the article states was certified gold for exceeding sales of more than 1 million copies on 25th August 1964.

Now, in terms of Billboard Chart numbers "A Hard Day's Night" was a lesser hit than "Baby Love" .. here are the figures for their respective Billboard Hot 100 chart runs.

"Hard Days Night" .. 18th July 1964 .. 13 weeks on the charts, 2 at #1 .. 1st August and 8th August.

"Baby Love" .. 3rd October 1964 .. 13 weeks on the charts, 4 at #1 .. 31st Oct, 7th Nov, 14th Nov 21st Nov.

It seems to me incredibly unlikely that a record that was at #1 for two weeks in August of 1964 actually sold significantly more than one that was #1 for virtually all of November 1964, so on that basis alone I would be astounded if "Baby Love" hadn't reached the Million mark in the U.S. by the end of 1964.


Which brings me back to the original subject of this thread .. the U.S. sales of "Stoned Love" in 1971.

If the Billboard assertation that singles sales per Capita in the U.S. and the U.K. in 1969 were approximately the same then it seems likely that there was little divergence by early 1971 and maybe we could use my "proportioning" idea to interpolate U.S. sales.

Florence's list has U.K. sales of "Stoned Love" as 355000, and as it had only one U.K. chart run virtually all of that would have to be in 1971.

So .. if "Stoned Love" had been just as big a hit in the U.S. as it was in the U.K. then it would seem likely that U.S. sales were in the 1.4 to 1.5 Million range.

In pure chart terms "Stoned Love" was actually a slightly bigger hit in the U.K. [[13 weeks peaking at #3) than on the Billboard Hot 100 [[14 weeks peaking at #7) but even this to me indicate that U.S. sales in excess of a Million were very likely.

Interesting thread this isn't it!!

Roger ..

[florence]

Florence .. being a "UK Chart Watcher" of sorts I can easily believe the higher US figures because I can compare them with their UK sales. This is on one assumption and two known facts.

I "assume" that the UK sales figures that I have seen for the various Motown hits, such as those in your "30 biggest selling UK Motown singles" thread are reasonably correct, as the UK charts were always sales based and so "rough" sales figures would be known from the data used to compile the British charts.

I "know" that back in the mid-late '60s the population of the US was approximately four times that of the UK [[around 50 Million in the UK and 200 million in the US) and I also "know" that in the '60s wages etc. were significantly higher in the US than in the UK and so there was a lot more disposable income around in the US than in the UK.

The Top 30 selling UK Motown singles list has "Baby Love" selling 500000 copies in the UK .. though this may include some sales from the 1974 reissue. The 1964 UK chart run of "Baby Love" seems very similar to its US Billboard "Hot 100" run .. in the UK "Baby Love" spent fifteen weeks on the chart with two of those at number one, in the US "Baby Love spent thirteen weeks on the "Hot 100" with four of those at number one.

The UK figure of 500000 sales for "Baby Love" seem totally in line to me with reported sales of other UK #1 hits in that 1964/5 period, and even if it does include the 1974 reissue that would still indicate to me that the 1964 UK release sold 400000.

So .. I don't find it hard to believe that "Baby Love" might have sold 3 Million in the US in 1964 if, with a similar chart run in Britain, it managed to sell 400000 at the same time .. If I take the lower UK figure of 400000, multiply that by four [[to take in account the difference in US/UK population) and then add 50% to take into account differences in disposable income it comes out as 2.4 Million .. if I take the higher UK figure of 500000 and do the same it actually does come out as 3 Million.

Roger

Sorry, Roger I was referring to the UK when I mentioned the higher sales figure for Stoned Love.

The problem is whether the UK figure is right - Strange has a perfectly logical point when he says that a Silver Disc was never claimed but there's something odd here and I'm trying to follow a couple of different leads.

I think the UK figure of circa 500k for Baby Love is reasonably accurate - as you say it was a very big hit here in 1964 and would have sold in the high 300s/low 400s, then its 10-week run peaking at #12 could have been around 80k. It's one of the Supremes' singles which could have sold an additional few thousand copies over the years plus a few on Download.

The figure given includes sales from both chart runs - in the case of Baby Love it had the same B-side unlike others in the list so there can be no argument over that.

I'm not sure you can correlate the figures in the UK to the US but unless you discount everything Strange says it wouldn't look to have sold anywhere near 3m in the US.

Interestingly The Top 10 Of Music published in the UK in 1992 has Baby Love as the fifth biggest selling single of 1964 in the US [[behind four Beatles singles but ahead of A Hard Day's Night) - unfortunately there is no information given as to where they got this information but they do say their statistics are based primarily [[hmmm) on sales.

[Strange]

Ha guys, equally stimulating responses! I am impressed with the interest and understanding shown and maybe it is time we started a specific thread devoted to all these chart and sales topics that are - to me anyway - fascinating.

For instance, Florence says she's still following up a couple of angles for 'Stoned Love' and so maybe I should bring this post below over here as it might have been missed?

Any guesses about the other silver?

I'll attempt to explain my theories some more, and answer your latest observations Roger and Florence, in the fullness of time!


Fair enough Hotspurman, I totally agree that there is more than just Motown music - but maybe not much better!

There will be around a hundred silvers 70-73 from Disc, with the principal Motown one that I recall of the top of my head being 'I Want You Back' on 14th March 1970 and then 'Tears of a Clown' and Stevie's 'I Don't Know Why' announced on 19th September 1970.

Anyone want to guess the last one?

[Strange]

Sorry, Roger I was referring to the UK when I mentioned the higher sales figure for Stoned Love.

The problem is whether the UK figure is right - Strange has a perfectly logical point when he says that a Silver Disc was never claimed but there's something odd here and I'm trying to follow a couple of different leads.

I think the UK figure of circa 500k for Baby Love is reasonably accurate - as you say it was a very big hit here in 1964 and would have sold in the high 300s/low 400s, then its 10-week run peaking at #12 could have been around 80k. It's one of the Supremes' singles which could have sold an additional few thousand copies over the years plus a few on Download.

The figure given includes sales from both chart runs - in the case of Baby Love it had the same B-side unlike others in the list so there can be no argument over that.

I'm not sure you can correlate the figures in the UK to the US but unless you discount everything Strange says it wouldn't look to have sold anywhere near 3m in the US.

Interestingly The Top 10 Of Music published in the UK in 1992 has Baby Love as the fifth biggest selling single of 1964 in the US [[behind four Beatles singles but ahead of A Hard Day's Night) - unfortunately there is no information given as to where they got this information but they do say their statistics are based primarily [[hmmm) on sales.

Interceding a bit here, but I think Roger was aware that you were talking about the UK sales of 'Stoned Love', at least that was my understanding from where he went with his original post. Anyway, apart from what I'm hoping to show about the real [[at least as far as we know based on RIAA data) single sales of individual titles in the States, the same can be estimated within reason - never certainty! - based on the UK award schemes and chart comparisons. As Roger has rightly said, the UK has always had a very strong sales-based reliability in its hit parade results, even way back when in the 60s!

Hopefully the additional awards I posted above are of use in that regard?

I see that downloads are being included in your commentary now Florence regarding 'Baby Love'. I would be unable to add much about those and as I've hinted before to me they are whims or spur-of-the-moment purchases and just track based to boot, so let's not include them in the debate. It is confusing enough as it it! The physical format [[preferably only including the original release and its identical reissues) is what I care about; I'll be dead and gone by the time all these records are consigned to history by the instant gratification of digital sales so let's not go there - please?

That aside, the logic I would ask you to consider this time is the reality that the sales awards schemes were of sufficient worth and merit publicity-wise to the artist/management/label that they were keen to claim them as soon as they could? That is my opinion of these certifications anyway, be they the UK style of self-cert or the US audit-check variety. They were something to achieve, a recognition of success within the industry and beyond. If that wasn't the case then why would Motown or others before [[and after) bother with 'in-house' awards? Therefore I submit that they were both important and applied for as soon as possible after the appropriate level had been reached - 250,000 copies in Great Britain.

Ok, if that is where I'm coming from [[and with some conviction I might add...), I would ask you to now re-consider your "high 300s/low 400s" conclusion for the original chart performance of 'Baby Love' when set against the silver disc announcement date of 5th December, at which time the single had slipped from No. 1 to No. 3 in its seventh charted week, and then it went 8, 10, 15. I know you are aware that the chart is but a snapshot in time of an earlier sales period Florence, so all it leaves us to really consider is the position that 'Baby Love' was really at in shipment terms - no, not retail sales - as of December 5. I'd say that it was probably in-between Nos 8 & 10, but realistically it was finished as a major popular selling single as far as the EMI marketing folk were concerned, even if the public still picked up a further 10-20k into and thru Xmas.

We are all three [[you, me and Roger) agreed that the 'Baby Love' re-issue is the same pairing as the original and so the 1974 sales should be legitimately counted [[although it isn't for us to say, sadly!). If anyone follows the logic of what I'm saying it joins 'Stoned Love' as being another inaccurate entry in that Motown list - that is unless we up the 1974 version to nearer 200-plus thousand!

If anyone wants to have the chapter and verse on Ash/Crampton [[and Lazell) as per your Top Ten of Music observations then I'll be happy to bore you...

[smark21]

I can't believe I'm going to contribute to a sales and charts thread, but here it goes. Isn't the Billboard Singles chart standings a compilation of both sales and radio airplay? So Baby Love could have had its #1 because of radio spins, not due to #1 in sales. Also, even if it's based soley on sales from the reporting period, perhaps A Hard Day's Night sold, let's say 200k the first week at #1 and 175k the 2nd week at #1, but by the time Baby Love hit number one, it did not with less cumulative sales over its 4 week reign than A Hard Day's Night did in its 2 week run? Just speculation. In the end, both songs survived and are both iconic [[if overplayed) songs for each act.

[florence]

I can't believe I'm going to contribute to a sales and charts thread, but here it goes. Isn't the Billboard Singles chart standings a compilation of both sales and radio airplay? So Baby Love could have had its #1 because of radio spins, not due to #1 in sales. Also, even if it's based soley on sales from the reporting period, perhaps A Hard Day's Night sold, let's say 200k the first week at #1 and 175k the 2nd week at #1, but by the time Baby Love hit number one, it did not with less cumulative sales over its 4 week reign than A Hard Day's Night did in its 2 week run? Just speculation. In the end, both songs survived and are both iconic [[if overplayed) songs for each act.

Fair enough point regarding Billboard but neither Cashbox [[at that stage) nor Record World included any airplay in its charts and Baby Love was #1 on both of them.

As you say though the chart position in any one week doesn't indicate the levels of sales - all it tells you is that a particular record was the best , second best etc selling record in that week.

[florence]

Interceding a bit here, but I think Roger was aware that you were talking about the UK sales of 'Stoned Love', at least that was my understanding from where he went with his original post. Anyway, apart from what I'm hoping to show about the real [[at least as far as we know based on RIAA data) single sales of individual titles in the States, the same can be estimated within reason - never certainty! - based on the UK award schemes and chart comparisons. As Roger has rightly said, the UK has always had a very strong sales-based reliability in its hit parade results, even way back when in the 60s!

Hopefully the additional awards I posted above are of use in that regard?

I see that downloads are being included in your commentary now Florence regarding 'Baby Love'. I would be unable to add much about those and as I've hinted before to me they are whims or spur-of-the-moment purchases and just track based to boot, so let's not include them in the debate. It is confusing enough as it it! The physical format [[preferably only including the original release and its identical reissues) is what I care about; I'll be dead and gone by the time all these records are consigned to history by the instant gratification of digital sales so let's not go there - please?

That aside, the logic I would ask you to consider this time is the reality that the sales awards schemes were of sufficient worth and merit publicity-wise to the artist/management/label that they were keen to claim them as soon as they could? That is my opinion of these certifications anyway, be they the UK style of self-cert or the US audit-check variety. They were something to achieve, a recognition of success within the industry and beyond. If that wasn't the case then why would Motown or others before [[and after) bother with 'in-house' awards? Therefore I submit that they were both important and applied for as soon as possible after the appropriate level had been reached - 250,000 copies in Great Britain.

Ok, if that is where I'm coming from [[and with some conviction I might add...), I would ask you to now re-consider your "high 300s/low 400s" conclusion for the original chart performance of 'Baby Love' when set against the silver disc announcement date of 5th December, at which time the single had slipped from No. 1 to No. 3 in its seventh charted week, and then it went 8, 10, 15. I know you are aware that the chart is but a snapshot in time of an earlier sales period Florence, so all it leaves us to really consider is the position that 'Baby Love' was really at in shipment terms - no, not retail sales - as of December 5. I'd say that it was probably in-between Nos 8 & 10, but realistically it was finished as a major popular selling single as far as the EMI marketing folk were concerned, even if the public still picked up a further 10-20k into and thru Xmas.

We are all three [[you, me and Roger) agreed that the 'Baby Love' re-issue is the same pairing as the original and so the 1974 sales should be legitimately counted [[although it isn't for us to say, sadly!). If anyone follows the logic of what I'm saying it joins 'Stoned Love' as being another inaccurate entry in that Motown list - that is unless we up the 1974 version to nearer 200-plus thousand!

If anyone wants to have the chapter and verse on Ash/Crampton [[and Lazell) as per your Top Ten of Music observations then I'll be happy to bore you...


The list includes all sales up to the end of 2008.

This obviously will include Downloads plus any singles sold from when the EPOS machines were introduced. It could very well be that because they were back catalogue many not have been recorded when the BMRB Diaries were written by hand.

The full Downoaod total for any single since 1994 can be obtained at the flick of a switch - unfortunately this is onlt available to those with connections to the Music Industry.

It's not impossible BL sold a reasonable number of copies between 1965 and 1974 and then afterwards without troubling the charts. I wonder was the record actually deleted after 1964 or available on ordewr and re-issued in 1974 as public demand was increasing?

The Supremes in the UK are defined by two records - to a lesser extent You Can't Hurry Love but mostly by BL. Ask any-one in the street and of anyone who does know of their records the vast majority of responses will be BL.

I would not be surprised this ran into five figures but I don't think it would be a significant proportion of the total sales.

There really is no exact hard evidence of exactly how many BL sold in 1964. Like Roger I am basing my estimate in relation to how other leading records in that year sold - many towards 500k.

It could be as low as 350k although I think higher but then this is based on the BMRB Motown list which you don't think is accurate. They say BL is #8 while The FourTops Reach Out is #15.

The Virgin Book Of Hit Singles confirmed that RO had sold c470k in Aptil 2010 which means BL is more than this. Do you accept or take it that Virgin is giving misinformation? Hmmmm

There would really be no other way for the OCC to have sales figures for a record from 1964 except from the record company- it's up to you whether you think they are supplying false information but it puts it towards the 500k mark.

A big hunk of BL's sales could relate to how many they sold when they were at #1. Shipments will obviously always run ahead of over-counter sales. I can see what you are saying if the shipment figure only passed the 250k mark on 5th December but that is the week end date when the record was certified. How long did it take Disc to give the award when it received the claim etc?

As the record accelerated towards #1 there may have been big shipments in mid November sold around the period the record was #1 and the Company then made a claim towards the end of the month.

The thing is we don't know. I'm taking something on trust from a reputable comapny and other facts which also may or may not be wrong tie in with this. You don't believe this and also think the Silver Disc claim was made the instant the record passed the 250k shipment mark.

There's no satisfactory answer!!

As for Ash/Crampton I personally don't really rate it. Some lists are wrong on the info. I have but then that comes from the OCC and panel sales over the years.

[Strange]

Fair enough point regarding Billboard but neither Cashbox [[at that stage) nor Record World included any airplay in its charts and Baby Love was #1 on both of them.

As you say though the chart position in any one week doesn't indicate the levels of sales - all it tells you is that a particular record was the best , second best etc selling record in that week.

Indeed that is true Florence, but as I keep pointing out, if the charts had any value [[and the whole industry used and followed them, so you kinda have to accept they were of some use!) then they do reveal more 'in aggregate' than just the snapshot ranking as to the bestselling hits of a given week.

As for the airplay component, there is a lot of misunderstanding about that too it seems. I've no doubt things are very different today, but back in the 60s the impact of radio plays on the Hot 100 was largely at the lower end of the spectrum. So, for instance, it was worthwhile getting the DJs some free copies and encouraging them to play your latest release because it could lead to a chart entry [[not to mention the blindingly obvious that a label needed its product to be heard for anyone to buy it!).

Once the record had 'broken' in radio land sales took over [[equally obviously), or didn't, and the further up the chart a hit climbed the airplay factor was less important. It was, in fact, a given! That is the nature of Top 40 radio...they play the Top 40 hits!

By the time you're into the reaches of the Top 10 and higher the records are all being played nationwide and the sales aspect is what dictates which climbs the highest and makes numero uno, and then for how long. If it isn't selling it'll soon be taken of rotation to make way for the next sounds.

So airplay is only a chart factor of importance in the breaking of these hits. I would not consider the US charts [[any of them) reliable from a sales point-of-view much below the Top 20; but then I wouldn't give much value to the UK ones that low down either as the margins are so small and the positions can be very interchangeable.

Anyway, what makes you think that Cash Box and Record World were not airplay-oriented too?

Smark wrote:

"Also, even if it's based soley on sales from the reporting period, perhaps A Hard Day's Night sold, let's say 200k the first week at #1 and 175k the 2nd week at #1, but by the time Baby Love hit number one, it did not with less cumulative sales over its 4 week reign than A Hard Day's Night did in its 2 week run? Just speculation. In the end, both songs survived and are both iconic [[if overplayed) songs for each act."

And I agree with all those points. You might have found it hard to believe you were contributing on a sales and chart thread Smark, but you've hit the nail on the head concerning the sales of the No. 1 so feel free to keep posting!

[BobC]

I don't understand any need for conspiracy theories regarding Florence Ballard's solo career. Have you heard the album? The material is weak, the vocal performances were just okay, and Florence was still drinking--and add to that the fact that her manager was just a limo driver/husband whom many people didn't like or trust.

And even if the material was great and right for Florence's voice, and had great management, why would she be guaranteed a hit straight out of the box? The Supremes certainly didn't get that. It took 11 flops before they hit. The truth is, most records bomb. Where is the need for a conspiracy?

Berry Gordy hated what happened with Flo and the Supremes. He hated it. Even if it was just about the money and the potential hit the group would take if Flo took off, Berry did not want to mess with the formula--but his hand was forced.

[florence]

Anyway, what makes you think that Cash Box and Record World were not airplay-oriented too?


So were both the Cashbox and Record World chart compiled incorporating airplay?

For years now I have thought both were sales only with Cashbox late in it's lifespan [[late70s) beginning to use airplay.

[Strange]

A very interesting post there Strange [[Your Post #190).

I'd be very interested to know where I can find the stated cumulative figure for U.S. singles sales in 1964 of just 99 Million.

To me this figure seems astonishingly low, especially set against the U.K. figure you state of just under 73 Million [[which is close to my guestimate of 80 Million).

I would have thought that U.S. singles sales in this period would have been much higher and I've been busy googling trying to find some clues.

The nearest I've come to any success is an article I've found about Japanese Sales in Billboard, dated 19th December 1970.

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=mSkEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA39&lpg=PA39&dq=us+record+single+1964+billboard+total+productio n+japan&source=bl&ots=vJ4hXi2VT2&sig=z1gATkaS0EincO1T5qZrUR5iplE&hl=en&sa=X&ei=jcHpToq5Dc724QTygoCRCQ&sqi=2&ved=0CDMQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q&f=false

In this it states that in 1969 "singles sales in Japan were 0.7 units per capita, whereas in the U.S. and U.K. they were about 1.0.

So, if Billboard in 1970 is to believed the total sales of singles in the U.S. in 1969 were around the 200 Million figure and in the U.K. they were around the 50 Million mark.

This seems broadly speaking correct with the U.K. figures you quote of between 46 and 47 Million, so it seems logical to assume their U.S. estimate is correct as well.

However, something seems wrong here as this 1969 U.S. figure is double the amount you state as being the total for 1964, yet the consensus of opinion is that in 1960s America they were in steady decline! Are we all wrong?

I also found this interesting article on the breaking of THE BEATLES in the U.S. which occurred in 1964 ..

http://www.pophistorydig.com/?p=3421

An interesting comments in this is that ..

"They [[The Beatles) had 15 separate recordings in 1964 - nine singles and six albums - that each sold 1 million or more copies, representing total Beatle sales in the U.S. that one year of more than 25 million copies".

Which means that at the absolute minimum THE BEATLES sold 9 Million singles in 1964, and as the article states figures for "I Want To Hold Your Hand" as 3.4 Million by the end of March, with "Can't Buy Me Love" selling 2.1 Million at that time it looks like the cumulative total for Beatles singles sold in the U.S. in 1964 is much higher.

It doesn't leave much for everyone else does it, though the article does state that in the first quarter of 1964 THE BEATLES accounted for a staggering 60% of U.S. record sales.

One BEATLES record that could give a pointer to the sales of "Baby Love" is THE BEATLES last hit prior to "Baby Love" .. "A Hard Day's Night" which the article states was certified gold for exceeding sales of more than 1 million copies on 25th August 1964.

Now, in terms of Billboard Chart numbers "A Hard Day's Night" was a lesser hit than "Baby Love" .. here are the figures for their respective Billboard Hot 100 chart runs.

"Hard Days Night" .. 18th July 1964 .. 13 weeks on the charts, 2 at #1 .. 1st August and 8th August.

"Baby Love" .. 3rd October 1964 .. 13 weeks on the charts, 4 at #1 .. 31st Oct, 7th Nov, 14th Nov 21st Nov.

It seems to me incredibly unlikely that a record that was at #1 for two weeks in August of 1964 actually sold significantly more than one that was #1 for virtually all of November 1964, so on that basis alone I would be astounded if "Baby Love" hadn't reached the Million mark in the U.S. by the end of 1964.


Which brings me back to the original subject of this thread .. the U.S. sales of "Stoned Love" in 1971.

If the Billboard assertation that singles sales per Capita in the U.S. and the U.K. in 1969 were approximately the same then it seems likely that there was little divergence by early 1971 and maybe we could use my "proportioning" idea to interpolate U.S. sales.

Florence's list has U.K. sales of "Stoned Love" as 355000, and as it had only one U.K. chart run virtually all of that would have to be in 1971.

So .. if "Stoned Love" had been just as big a hit in the U.S. as it was in the U.K. then it would seem likely that U.S. sales were in the 1.4 to 1.5 Million range.

In pure chart terms "Stoned Love" was actually a slightly bigger hit in the U.K. [[13 weeks peaking at #3) than on the Billboard Hot 100 [[14 weeks peaking at #7) but even this to me indicate that U.S. sales in excess of a Million were very likely.

Interesting thread this isn't it!!

Roger ..

Yes, interesting indeed Roger although maybe not everyone’s cup of tea as we’re still only scratching the surface on all this sales and chart stuff. I’ll now attempt to send all but those with the most chronic insomnia condition to sleep….


The data on US sales that I gave were RIAA industry estimates. I guess you could find them on their site, but they tend to charge the earth for their statistical information at the best of times so no doubt they’d do the same with those. You could ask them nicely to comment perhaps, you never know!

Yep, 99m is one hell of a surprise to me too Roger for 1964, and yet then again that is only because I, like you, had all sorts of misconceptions foisted on me by the record industry’s hype machine as to what individual hit records were selling. There is no way that we were to know otherwise, I mean who could other than people within the industry? It is only when one looks into things fairly studiously [[sadly, I’ve done rather too much of that!) and realises there were just as many labels that didn’t overstate their figures that the penny begins to drop that while singles were still big business, they weren’t anywhere near the peak years of the mid-50s.

You’ve alluded to the main culprits for our rose-tinted view of record sales in the mid-60s – the Beatles. Quite simply they were so far ahead of everyone else that if it were a boxing match they would, as they say, stop the contest! More on this later.

I recalled your link to the Billboard Japanese figures, and again using the proportionality factor the calculations you’ve then made for US [[and UK) numbers of singles sold would be about right and you [[and I) would be forgiven for coming to the conclusion that 200m was therefore about the number for the States. However two things are important to point out about Japanese data here; firstly, it is of course all about production [[not sales to the consumer, which is often assumed, the sloppy use of the wrong terminology by journalists not helping us one bit either btw), and secondly that Japan produced for the entire region. It isn’t something most would consider, but the four or five majors record producing nations were also big exporters, and the data can be skewed dramatically by that factor. For instance, if I remember rightly Germany produced 100m or so records in 1969 for the first time. It was a headline number and generally taken as for their internal consumption. In fact they exported to many of the Germanic-speaking countries too, and that accounted for 20% of the 100m…so you see how the bald facts can be misleading.

Anyway, I digress, the actual RIAA estimate of unit single ‘sales’ in 1969 was 157m! Now you say “are we all wrong” when referring back to my 99m figure for 1964 against your calculation of 200m for 1969, and I would say “yes, very probably”! There is perhaps a reason why there are more Motown awards from the late sixties Roger, and basically it is because they were selling/producing more singles generally than in 1963/4.

[Strange]

Continuing on Roger:

So back to the Beatles, who, as you say, makes it so hard to reconcile the sales of the day. I suppose they should be slung out of the record selling books as they were a law unto themselves, and as I mentioned it makes us misunderstand the basic figures of every other ‘normal’ hit. There is little doubt they had some very large percentages of the market at various times and that first quarter figure of 60% is ground well trod. Of course the veracity of the claim is hard to verify, it is so wishy-washy, but the other numbers, and especially 25m records in total for the year, could well be acceptable. You might not know, but their album sales were well documented in court case responses, and again not wishing to test my memory too much but LP and tape sales were in the neighbourhood of 9m that year, leaving us with 16m for the singles. It isn’t quite right and once more this isn’t perhaps the time and place to elaborate further, but if we go with that figure we also have [[fortunately for my simple brain) an easy percentage of the singles market – 16% or thereby. It seems reasonable when looking at their impact and chart dominance when you say it like that, don’t you think? And equally when that is stripped away the lower [[sub-one million) totals of most of their competitors’ best shots is more readily understood.

Everything is linked together too. I like the way you looked at ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ by way of what ‘Baby Love’ may or may not have sold. It is in theory a reasonable method, but as Smark21 pointed out in his post there is no way of knowing what the No. 1 record in any given week was selling, and again we do have to appreciate that we are dealing here with a Beatles hit that would simply ship big and fly of the shelves super-fast. Even so, it wasn’t an instant gold disc, was it? By the time it was announced on 25th August the single had been absent from the No. 1 spot for almost a fortnight, and had been on the market for over eight weeks, but most notably it was in its sixth week in the Hot 100 [[seventh in Cash Box, which only kept the single on top for a fortnight).

By comparison, look back at the previous two Capitol singles and see how the certification announcements for ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ came during its third week in the chart and for ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ in its opening week, so obviously ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ in contrast was ‘struggling’ to shift seven figures, which by-the-way were shipments and not sales. The next release, ‘I Feel Fine’, got its award announced in its fourth week in the Hot 100.

This shipment issue is the crucial thing Roger. As I’ve said to Florence, the likelihood is that Motown shipped one million copies, but after returns all that Universal could show the RIAA auditors was the final net total beneath one million, hence the modern-day gold for 500,000-plus net shipments. Comparing the chart runs is all very well, but what we see is a fairly swift rise to the top in Billboard and then a month at the summit which would appear to have been a close-run thing with its competitors judging by the Cash Box results [[although to be fair it was four weeks in front with Record World too).

There is no knowing for sure of course, and it will all be very close either way, but what we have is an RIAA gold only 33 years later, and similarly, as I’ve mentioned before, only three other non-Beatle RIAA gold discs in the whole of 1964. It tells me that the ultimate sale to the consumer was not above one million.

Look at the last of those three non-Beatle golds for the year, the Roy Orbison classic ‘Oh Pretty Woman’. It had three weeks on top and garnered its gold disc in its 10th week in the Hot 100 as it prepared to exit the Top 10. Another example of what it took to just make it to one million shipments for anyone other than the Fab4. The other two awards were the m-o-r Adult Contemporary favourite ‘Everybody Loves Somebody’ from Dean Martin [[gold in its 8th week charted) and ‘Rag Doll’ by the Four Seasons that also took 10 weeks to reach the shipment milestone. But most telling is all the other big hits of the year that didn’t make the million seller grade – and unless you subscribe to the theory that they were all reticent like Motown to bother with the award, well it once more speaks louder than words to me.

As for ‘Stoned Love’ [[again!), the estimates in Florence’s list are of little value as they are simply the guesses of someone like you and me, so using 355k for the UK to calculate a US total is the equivalent of two wrongs not making a right. Moreover, I’ve shown how the total has to be inaccurate in that particular instance because the single didn’t win a silver disc for 250,000 sales in Britain, so ergo it must have shipped less in 1971. To then get to 355k it has to be reliant on some unbelievably strong sales in its post-chart life and the download era that beggars belief.

All of that notwithstanding, if we did accept that there is some measure of trustworthyness in population and/or market size proportionality to judge these things, and we use the correct ratios for 1970/1 [[approximately three-fold US-UK) on the less than 250k ‘evidence’, then we are looking at a ‘Stoned Love’ US total of 750k net sales perhaps. That makes sense.

Of course what they shipped is once more a different thing altogether…

[Penny]

Well thank you for all that information. I dozed off before I could read it all but I'll be back.

Penny:p

[Strange]

So were both the Cashbox and Record World chart compiled incorporating airplay?

For years now I have thought both were sales only with Cashbox late in it's lifespan [[late70s) beginning to use airplay.

Well to be honest with you Florence I just don’t know for sure, which was kinda why I was asking the question of you! I guess it is necessary to track down someone who was active in the Cash Box and Record World chart compilation days of the sixties, or find some other trusted source of information.

What I would say though is that it would seem bizarre to me that the competitors to Billboard didn’t consider the airplay factor when drawing up their weekly rankings. Indeed, there is evidence that this must have happened, if not to the same weighting extent perhaps. In the case of Cash Box for instance their original existence had been in support of the Juke Box industry [[hence the title), and therefore that alone suggests to me they would factor in other things that influenced popularity. Billboard prior to the Hot 100 commencing in 1958 had, as you know, a Juke Box and Disc Jockey chart along with the Bestsellers chart that stuck with retail numbers, all of these fed into the Top 100.


I may be completely wrong to assume the others were also savvy enough to not exclude parts of the industry that were valuable to them [[advertising revenue being the primary driver here of course), but there it is!


Anyway, as I mentioned earlier, I think it is all very much a red herring for chart watchers who are considering how worthy the US hit parades are in assessing sales results to allow too much for the impact of airplay. Its benefit was principally to get a record into the lists, and the higher up we go the weight of that particular criteria is obviously lessened, if not entirely negated, as sales take over.

Certainly once a record has made it to Top 40 radio then the playing field is much more level for obvious competitive reasons, and I doubt there would be much to stop it selling [[and rising in the charts) other than its own ultimate popularity. It is the American way after all!

[jobeterob]

What I am certain about is that Billboard was regarded as much more reliable than Cashbox which was much more reliable than Record World.

Cashbox might have been airplay only..........but that I am not at all sure of anymore.

[Jimi LaLumia]

It was called Ca$hbox for a reason!...lol

[motony]

jukebox plays was calculated in the mix too.

[Glenpwood]

All the chart trade mags had periods of payola buying chart positions. For example when Cashbox was having major financial difficulties a few years before it shuttered Wayne Newton or Curb bought him a number one pop single with a cover of the Box Tops The Letter which didn't chart or bubble under on the Billboard Hot 100. In a Morown related note one of the high up execs at Casablanca Records detailed in his memoir how he payed the chart manager of Billboard a hundred grand in cash to make Thank God It's Friday Soundtrack the number one album and cussing him out when he took the money but didn't do it since RSO paid more money under the table to the exec to keep Saturday Night Fever number one. He also discusses sending acts to their conferences as well as coke and cash to keep songs going up the charts in those days to keep dog product from being returned that they had certified gold or platinum. [[ The Kiss solo albums is the main one I recall but I'll have to pull the book out). We are never going to know the true answer since the accounting records are incomplete, there was no Soundscan to count units, and no one was smart enough like Tommy James back in the early seventies when he went after Morris Levy and Roulette Records when he couldn't get an accurate accounting of his royalties to go to the printer who did all the labels for his records to figure out he got underpaid by millions. He never got the money but it was a genius way to get a true figure. Also, the market fluctuates wildly by the week let alone the year so pulling out The Beatles figures mean nothing. It'd be like saying the week this year Lady GaGa sold a million means the week this year Amos Lee sold 40,000 and set the record for lowest selling chart topper was just Blue Note skimming off the top and really did the same as GaGa. The chart every week is supposedly the most played and bought songs in the country and that can vary so a number seven in 1970 could be the same as a number one in 1981 or a number 40 in 2011 so at the end of the day it should be about the fans enjoyment of Stoned Love. I've never let a sales figure or chart position tell me to like something more or less.

Ok, I've rambled enough lol

[florence]

Well to be honest with you Florence I just don’t know for sure, which was kinda why I was asking the question of you! I guess it is necessary to track down someone who was active in the Cash Box and Record World chart compilation days of the sixties, or find some other trusted source of information.

What I would say though is that it would seem bizarre to me that the competitors to Billboard didn’t consider the airplay factor when drawing up their weekly rankings. Indeed, there is evidence that this must have happened, if not to the same weighting extent perhaps. In the case of Cash Box for instance their original existence had been in support of the Juke Box industry [[hence the title), and therefore that alone suggests to me they would factor in other things that influenced popularity. Billboard prior to the Hot 100 commencing in 1958 had, as you know, a Juke Box and Disc Jockey chart along with the Bestsellers chart that stuck with retail numbers, all of these fed into the Top 100.


I may be completely wrong to assume the others were also savvy enough to not exclude parts of the industry that were valuable to them [[advertising revenue being the primary driver here of course), but there it is!


Anyway, as I mentioned earlier, I think it is all very much a red herring for chart watchers who are considering how worthy the US hit parades are in assessing sales results to allow too much for the impact of airplay. Its benefit was principally to get a record into the lists, and the higher up we go the weight of that particular criteria is obviously lessened, if not entirely negated, as sales take over.

Certainly once a record has made it to Top 40 radio then the playing field is much more level for obvious competitive reasons, and I doubt there would be much to stop it selling [[and rising in the charts) other than its own ultimate popularity. It is the American way after all!

Can't find anything at all on how Record World compiled its chart but I do believe it was sales only so you pays your money and you takes your choice.

Couldn't find anything directly on Cashbox but found this article in an Elvis Presley site.

http://www.elvis-history-blog.com/elvis-cash-box.html

It looks authentic and ties in with what I had always believed - and again I think it was later in the 70s when they began to incorporate airplay.

It would be interesting if anyone could confirm that the percenatge of airplay:sales on Billboard was 80%:20% [[yes indeed).

The fact that Billboard and Cashbox in the main didn't have a lot of vast differences would tend to suggest airplay and sales ran along similar lines anyway.

Generally The supremes charted slightly higher on Cashbox. The biggest difference I think was the showing of Forever Came today which stalled at #28 on Billboard but which made #13 on Casbox.

Diana Ross' Reach Out And Touch and Remember Me were both top 10 on Cashbox.

Another thing too about the compilation of the US charts - they had various charts for various markets so if someone was selling majorly in the R&B market would these sales be reflected on the Pop Chart - that could certainly make a difference.

Couldn't Country Records rack up big sales without showing up in the Hot 100?

[Strange]

There is no doubt that it is widely believed Cash Box [[and possibly Record World/Music Vendor) did not include airplay in their respective charts, while equally those that bother with such things are aware Billboard did utilise airplay information when compiling the Hot 100.

I'm with you on this Florence; you pays your money and takes your choice! All I'm saying is the impact of airplay is reduced in importance the higher up the respective charts you go anyway - and as you also say there is not much difference in the peaks and durations in general too - which is really what we are discussing and concentrating on with regard to these sales issues and potential million or near-million sellers.

Once you slip below the Top 40 then whether airplay is included or just sales will matter little as the lines between positions will become more blurred as they will all be closer together naturally and the reporting [[both number of retailers and disc jockeys/stations) was obviously so much smaller.

That Elvis site link is bound to be biased btw...and I was amused that they came to the conclusion that Elvis charted longer in Billboard than Cash Box with the examples they gave which showed that records were still getting DJ plays and being reported long after they'd left CB. Nonsense - it was simply the bigger chart in Billboard. But nevermind, lol. Oh, and the 'King Creole' being absent in Billboard might have been something to do with the fact Billboard ran an EP chart that kept it from showing up in the Hot 100...

So I wouldn't hold much credence to what fan sites say. I would however rely on Randy Price - the creator of the Cash Box chart website - who apparently was told that Cash Box did apply airplay information lower down their listing. Again, it is only those who worked for the paper who are gonna really know, and as I'm not bothered either way as the various listings all seem to pan out very similarly and like I say sales will win out at the top anyway, then it is all superfluous to what we are looking into about big hits like 'Stoned love' etc.

I have also been amused over the years by the misunderstandings about the genre charts. Sure, there were some records that were too 'country' or too 'black' for many pop stations and so they would have lost out to some extent with their peaks and longevity in the mainstream Hot 100 etc. Eddy Arnold and James Brown were two obvious examples. But once again, if the record broke out of its regional or genre background and went national and above Top 40 then it would have gotten all the airplay [[the stations wanted audiences, and would play what was popular wherever it came from) it deserved. It would have continued up the chart on its merits until demand - both from listeners and buyers - began to ebb.

It is a fallacy that acts were selling big and not getting the pop chart positions they justified. Joel Whitburn told me in 1977 that if a record was setting the genre charts on fire it would automatically crossover, that was how it worked. Of course there will be exceptions we can point to, but then that applies to the odd difference between the charts as you've also pointed out regarding 'Forever Came Today'.

Something about them proving the rule!

[roger]

It is a fallacy that acts were selling big and not getting the pop chart positions they justified. Joel Whitburn told me in 1977 that if a record was setting the genre charts on fire it would automatically crossover, that was how it worked. Of course there will be exceptions we can point to, but then that applies to the odd difference between the charts as you've also pointed out regarding 'Forever Came Today'.

Something about them proving the rule!

OK Strange .. So? How do you explain "The Turning Point" by TYRONE DAVIS reaching #1 on the Billboard R&B chart on 7th February 1976 and never featuring on the Billboard Hot 100?

Roger

[Strange]

OK Strange .. So? How do you explain "The Turning Point" by TYRONE DAVIS reaching #1 on the Billboard R&B chart on 7th February 1976 and never featuring on the Billboard Hot 100?

Roger

As I said Roger, there will be the odd 'exception that proves the rule'! You have found one, and there are others, yet as with my other comments concerning the occasional big variations between the peaks and lengths of stay in the three major listings, it isn't really of much import and in fact it underlines the weakness of the genre markets which is what Joel Whitburn wrote to me all those years ago. [[Yep, I've been 'involved' in this stuff too long!).

I didn't elaborate further as it seems I have already sent most to sleep, but seeing as you ask what Whitburn explained was the R&B and Country markets in themselves were way much smaller than the all-encompassing Pop arena. Kinda obvious really, but at the time I was like you and not convinced. I felt that many big hits in those two 'specialist' [[for want of a better word) were probably selling heavier than we were seeing. He said that wasn't the case and any big black or country hit in pure sales terms would crossover into Pop assuming the airplay was also there. The Hot 100 was the lead ranking - again kinda obvious.

So what he was saying was a hit - even a No. 1 - in the Hot Country Singles or R&B charts would not necessarily even be big enough to make the main Pop list. Yep, I was surprised, but that's what he said. Moreover, in the seventies especially their were plenty of black and country stations that fed the Billboard genre charts that weren't reflected in the pop stations as they had no appeal and equally didn't sell that heavily. Both the R&B and Country markets did not sell heavily to their audiences who preferred to listen on the radio. The economic reality of the time had a lot to do with this too I guess.

Tyrone Davis did have a history of cross-over Pop hits Roger, as you probably know. He's best known for 'Can I Change My Mind' and 'Turn Back the Hands of Time' which both were also R&B chartoppers and Top Ten in the Hot 100 at a time when genre single sales were buoyant. So much so that both managed to ship one million and attained the RIAA gold disc as a result. From then on his hits could crossover but not until 'Turning Point' did he make it back to the top of the R&B lists, and incredibly, as you say, it failed to reach the Hot 100 - the first R&B No. 1 to miss the main chart since 1955!

However, as I always say, don't trust in the one list and if we consider Cash Box and Record World we see 'Turning Point' made No. 78 [[6 wks on) and No. 64 respectively which was perhaps more in keeping with the trend and sales strength of a genre-restricted hit with not much crossover appeal. The chances are that the genre charts were more airplay weighted perhaps? Or as I’ve said before there is little difference between the lower rankings so anomalies like this will more easily occur? Moreover, there has been comment that CB and RW were sales-only and so again we can understand it not appearing in the Billboard if it was just a radio smash?
As Florence says. ‘you pays your money and takes your choice’. All I know is there are these examples of a seeming imbalance between the charts and so on that really do not occur that often and simply ‘prove the rule’!

[florence]

Here are JRT's figures for Supremes' singles from his 1989 bio Call Her Miss Ross:

Where Did Our Love Go 1,072,290
You Can't Hurry Love 1,104,012
Nothing But Heartaches 368,267
My World Is Empty barely 500k
Love Is Like An Itching 368k
Some Things You Never Get Used To 202,963
The Composer Barely 200k
No Matter What Sign less than 300k
Someday We'll Be Together over 2m copies eventually sold**

**From the book:

Other Supremes' singles which sold a million copies or more during the time of their release were "Where Did Our Love Go", "You Can't Hurry Love" and "Love Child". "I'm Gonna Make You Love Ne" which they recorded with The Temptations, also sold a million. Though Motown's sales figures are said to be incomplete, it seems that "Baby Love", "Come See About Me", "Stop! In The Name Of LOve" and "You Keep Me Hangin' On" probably all eventually sold a million copies as years of sales were tallied but they were not million-sellers at the time of their original release.

Despite press hype to the contrary , other famous Supremes' singles like "Back In My Arms Again", "Nothing But Heartaches", "Love Is Here And Now You're Gone" and "Reflections" did not even come close to selling a million, most sold roughly half of that.


Sales for Diana solo:

Reach Out And Touch barely 500k
A'int No Mountain 1,243,748
Remember Me 540,940
Reach Out I'll Be There 254,307
Touch Me In The Morning 1,504,909
Last Time I Saw Him 643,740
Sleepin' 46,162
Do You Know Where You're Going To 882,272
The Boss approx. 250k
It's My Turn 434,794


Some of those figures are so exact that he must have been given them and printed them in good faith. It could be that these were totals shipped before returns were factored in.

The Universal certifications in 1997 really muddy the waters. If you take them at face value then aside from "I'm Gonna Make You Love Me" they had only three singles which sold more than 500k - Someday 1m+, Baby Love and Stop! In The Name Of Love".

From what has been said it does seem probable that the Supremes' singles sales in the US are not as high as we were always led to believe and million sellers at the time were quite scarce in the market as a whole so not making the million is plausible but without anything concrete in the way of proof I just don't believe that only those three singles passed 500k. I knew about "Returns" but it would seem the scale was quite big. Could Motown for example in 1964 afford to ship over 1m copies of WDOLG and have over half returned to put the figure below 500k?

Of course, while it is unlikely and why would they? is it all possible Universal decided just to claim on the original standard of 2m for Platinum and 1m for Gold?

It could also be that their is much sales documentation missing but then you have to ask how come there would be so much missing for The Supremes yet apparently they were able to supply it all for The Temptations?

Maybe it is just as simple that contary to the perception that The Supremes were Motown's biggest sellers they were actually well outsold by The Temptations.

It looks to me as if Universal took a decision not to discontinue applying for back cetifications. If the figure for Diana's Touch Me was 1.5m shipped it's hard to believe it didn't do 1m but impossible to believe there could have been 1m returns to put it below the half-million.

Interestingly JRT supplied no figures at all for Diana's RCA sales so if the figures for Motown were not to hos mind authentic he would probably have given figures for those too!

Why did he remove the sales from the updated version of the book? Interestingly in it one record he still claims as a million seller is You Can't Hurry Love.

Off topic but does anyone have any figures for Diana's RCA singles? I have never seen anything at all for them.

Certainly none of them reached 1m but I somehow think Why Do Fools Fall In Love did over 500k and Mirror, Mirror and Muscles would be near to that.

Missing You is interesting. It was on the charts for nearly 6 months but spent the early part yo-yoing around the middle of the Hot 100. Depending on what sort of sales this part of the chart generated the accumulated totals over a large number of weeks could be quite healthy so the total for MY could maybe be surprising.

With regard to Stoned Love in the US I notice BayouMotownMan who apparently has worked out a lot of The Supremes' sales from their chart positions and his knowledge of the American market suggests it did 1.5m.

[Strange]

Can't find anything at all on how Record World compiled its chart but I do believe it was sales only so you pays your money and you takes your choice.

Couldn't find anything directly on Cashbox but found this article in an Elvis Presley site.

http://www.elvis-history-blog.com/elvis-cash-box.html

It looks authentic and ties in with what I had always believed - and again I think it was later in the 70s when they began to incorporate airplay.

It would be interesting if anyone could confirm that the percenatge of airplay:sales on Billboard was 80%:20% [[yes indeed).

The fact that Billboard and Cashbox in the main didn't have a lot of vast differences would tend to suggest airplay and sales ran along similar lines anyway.

Generally The supremes charted slightly higher on Cashbox. The biggest difference I think was the showing of Forever Came today which stalled at #28 on Billboard but which made #13 on Casbox.

Diana Ross' Reach Out And Touch and Remember Me were both top 10 on Cashbox.

Another thing too about the compilation of the US charts - they had various charts for various markets so if someone was selling majorly in the R&B market would these sales be reflected on the Pop Chart - that could certainly make a difference.

Couldn't Country Records rack up big sales without showing up in the Hot 100?

Darn, I spent a fair bit of time last night posting a reply for you Florence on this and when it came to post it logged me out…grrr. It was not bad either, if I say so myself, but now is lost to the ether and I’m sure this won’t convince as much. Lol.

No seriously, you raise some good points and again many were concerns of mine and I have kinda addressed some of them in response to Roger’s posts. Basically the problem of airplay will always be very minor as, to all intents and purposes, it really only affects the lower reaches of the Hot 100 [[and these positions in most any chart anywhere in the world are pretty much inter-changeable simply because the sales and airplay returns/reports will be very close). The higher we go the more equal Top 40 radio makes the airplay aspect anyway – by its very nature – and likewise the greater impression sales have on the final ranking.

If you say it was 80/20 in Billboard that sounds fine enough if it was the other way around! I’ve heard/read that before, but even though someone on a fan-centric website like the Elvis-link you gave says that Cash Box was sales-only, I would not rely on it very much over what Randy Price said [[the creator of the Cash Box Archive I’m sure you know). He has apparently been told that Cash Box did allow airplay factors in the lower half of their Top 100 in the sixties. I don’t know but I would think that was simply because they wouldn’t have been able to separate much of the sales-only positions that low as I’ve already suggested. I mean, the UK has the great reputation for sales reporting but it is well known that back then the picture became blurred even below the Top 20 – and I bet the NME or MM were probably monitoring more shops than even Cash Box were in the US!

So anyway, what is the crux of this imho is do the charts really have much airplay bias among the higher placings that most of us are interested in [[i.e. ‘Stoned Love’ which is the thread topic, lol), and I’d say ‘not much’. Equally, are we concerned that there are wild variations among these same higher placings and length of stay between the three main charts? Again I’d have to say ‘not much’.

That Elvis page I read further down and found some glaring bias/errors in reporting – again not surprisingly I guess. For instance, they have decided that ‘King Creole’ not being present in Billboard singles chart but in Cash Box is evidence of ‘differences’ but seem to not be aware that BB were running an EP chart at that time which was what ‘King Creole’ came from…

Then they address the problem of shorter chart runs in Cash Box and suggest that the longer runs in Billboard show the singles were still getting airplay from DJs long after they’d left CB, as if it was some kind of proof that CB were therefore sales-only. It didn’t seem to occur to them to just look at the shorter length of the CB charts at that time which explained the discrepancies…

As for genre issues, I have explained these above in reply to Roger and that is definitely as much of a red herring from self-interest groups like fans and label marketing departments than the reality. There will be a quirk here and there in the statistics that’ll show a rogue Country smash not getting its just desserts in the main Pop listings – a bit like the Tyrone Davis R&B chart-topper I covered – but otherwise no, there weren’t big selling Country records strangely missing from the pop lists.

[Strange]

Thanks for the JRT stats Florence. Really interesting and I think I can give a full and longwinded [[boring) analysis of what they are and how realistic they are over the next couple of days. My first impressions are most favorable...don't be so surprised!

[roger]

Well then, I'm certainly finding this a very interesting thread, yet are we anywhere nearer to actually answering the original question about how many copies "Stoned Love" actually sold?


In spite of what has been written here by Strange I can't help but feel that something is hugely wrong. Basically, I have great difficulty in believing the figures given for cumulative US record sales in the '60s, they same way too low to me.

I also find difficulty in believing that US total sales and/or production of singles actually rose by 60% between 1964 and 1969 from 99 to 157 million, when conventional wisdom has this as a period when sales of 45s were either flat or decreasing.

In Britain at that time unit sales of LPs were increasing every year and those of 45s were decreasing every year, and I find it difficult to believe that the US was so different.

Anyway, after some extensive googling I've found a book called "An International History Of The Recording Industry" by Pekka Gronnow and Lipo Saunio. Published 1998. This might shed some light on this.

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=paPRxPJ7jjEC&pg=PA135&dq=us+1960s+record+single+sales+peak&hl=en&sa=X&ei=ff7wTunFBonh8APf-uS3AQ&ved=0CFEQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=us%201960s%20record%20single%20sales%20peak&f=false

If you follow the link and scroll down a bit you should find a table of worldwide record sales in the 1960s and 1970s. Confusingly, the US figures are expressed only in million dollar values up to 1972, and there is no split between sales of singles and LPs.

For those who don't wish to trawl through the pages in the link, here are the relevent figures for the US and UK.

All figures are in millions. The colums are year, US $value, US Units, UK Units.


1961: 640 --- 76.4
1962: 687 --- 77.5
1963: 698 --- 85.5
1964: 758 --- 101.2
1965: 862 --- 93.8
1966: 959 --- 84.9
1967: 1173 --- 90.2
1968: 1358 --- 98.9
1969: 1586 --- 106.4
1970: 1660 --- 114.0
1971: 1744 --- 126.0
1972: 1924 --- 148.3
1973: 2016 616.0 177.9
1974: 2200 539.9 198.4
1975: 2391 533.3 202.1
1976: 2737 591.6 223.7
1977: 3500 698.2 231.6
1978: 4131 762.2 195.9
1979: 3676 683.0 187.0
1980: 3682 649.0 170.4

Its a pity the figures don't show the split between LPs and singles [[and cassettes later on) as it makes it very difficult to see what is happening.

However, I can believe the UK figures, for example with 1969 the singles figure quoted in this thread of 47 million would leave LP sales at around 59 million [[sales of EPs, 78s, etc. would have been minimal) which seems about right to me.

Similarly if the UK figure for 1964 includes about 73 million singles that would leave 28 million for LPs and EPs, which sounds quite feasible.

As to the US dollar based figures, do these equate to the published RIAA estimates if retail prices of singles and LPs are factored in?

If so, there is an interesting footnote at the bottom of the international figures ..

"Note: For most countries, the figures refer to sales by IFPI member companies only."

Now, the IFPA mentioned here is the "International Federation of the Phonographic Industry", of which bodies such as the RIAA [[in the US) and BPI [[in the UK) are affiliates.

So .. it looks like these figures are for RIAA and BPI members only.

And yet Motown [[along with a lot of other American "independent" record labels) weren't in the RIAA in the '60s, which means that if the total US figures are only for RIAA members they are being seriously underestimated.

It would be extremely interesting to know what percentage of US singles sales were from companies NOT affiliated with RIAA in the 1960s and early 1970s.

I think this actually highlights a crucial difference between the UK and US recording industries in the 1960s. In the US there were a whole host of independent labels capable of generating big selling hits.

In the UK the 1960s recording industry was dominated by EMI, Pye and Decca, all of whom were essentially electronics companies with record divisions. Then there was Philips [[a Dutch based electronics company) and US outfits such as RCA, CBS and Warner Brothers.

Very few UK chart hits in the mid '60s were on labels that that were not owned or operated by these large corporations, whose main business was more about making radios, televisions or movies rather than selling records. In contrast most of those 1960s US record companies were just that .. record companies!!

There were some British independents .. Oriole for example, which for a while distributed Motown, Sue .. which released R&B and Soul aimed at "Mods" and labels such as Bluebeat and Island that issued Jamaican Ska recordings, but none of these had many major sellers.

Things did change somewhat after 1967 when independents like Major-Minor, Island and President started to get chart hits, and when the German Polydor label made inroads [[largely through its licensing material from Atlantic records in New York) and even more in 1969 when a number of Rocksteady/Reggae records on independent labels such as Trojan made the UK charts.

The point I'm trying to make is that the 1960s UK recording industry was a lot more "Corporate" than the US one. Maybe this is why the sales figures are considered a lot more trustworthy.

Roger

[Strange]

Here are JRT's figures for Supremes' singles from his 1989 bio Call Her Miss Ross:

Where Did Our Love Go 1,072,290
You Can't Hurry Love 1,104,012
Nothing But Heartaches 368,267
My World Is Empty barely 500k
Love Is Like An Itching 368k
Some Things You Never Get Used To 202,963
The Composer Barely 200k
No Matter What Sign less than 300k
Someday We'll Be Together over 2m copies eventually sold**

**From the book:

Other Supremes' singles which sold a million copies or more during the time of their release were "Where Did Our Love Go", "You Can't Hurry Love" and "Love Child". "I'm Gonna Make You Love Ne" which they recorded with The Temptations, also sold a million. Though Motown's sales figures are said to be incomplete, it seems that "Baby Love", "Come See About Me", "Stop! In The Name Of LOve" and "You Keep Me Hangin' On" probably all eventually sold a million copies as years of sales were tallied but they were not million-sellers at the time of their original release.

Despite press hype to the contrary , other famous Supremes' singles like "Back In My Arms Again", "Nothing But Heartaches", "Love Is Here And Now You're Gone" and "Reflections" did not even come close to selling a million, most sold roughly half of that.

Ok Florence, let’s chew over these figures from the JRT book that you’ve kindly sourced for us. As I said yesterday, my first impressions are entirely favorable on the whole but, as they say, it all depends on the small print and the exact definitions before we can really be certain of anything. In that regard it’s a pity the guy didn’t feel inclined to reply to you when you contacted him…

So, my first concern would be are we certain that we have just US-only numbers here? Second of all, I’d want to then ascertain if the figures were gross or net for, as I’ve tried to explain, there is a big difference and Motown and other labels/companies were very good at talking about the former and ignoring the latter.

Thirdly there is what is perhaps best understood as ‘net net’! This is the bottomline total for royalty purposes and is where many folk are easily led into the realms of conspiracy theories about artists being ripped off as they simply don’t understand that contracts are complex things and rarely does anyone get a straight royalty on every record ‘out there’. If ever!

So within all these categories we need to realise that there are media and marketing department-friendly sales numbers [[overseas inclusive and/or total gross); basic net sales numbers [[i.e. after returns) and finally ‘net net’ which deducts from the net sales numbers the number of records issued as freebies. This might seem unfair to the act/artist in question [[and is basically what most of the law suits and claims of skullduggery have always been about in the industry over the years, but that was the sixties [[and before of course) for you. Like the poor old boxers, they were stitched up! Oh, and within the worse contracts the artists would only get 90% of the gross and be paying for recording studio time, session musicians and goodness knows what else before they saw a dime…

From what we know of RIAA awards and other realistic sales reports of the time, the first list is clearly very feasible:

Where Did Our Love Go 1,072,290
You Can't Hurry Love 1,104,012
Nothing But Heartaches 368,267
My World Is Empty barely 500k
Love Is Like An Itching 368k
Some Things You Never Get Used To 202,963
The Composer Barely 200k
No Matter What Sign less than 300k
Someday We'll Be Together over 2m copies eventually sold**

But which category of the three I’ve outlined would they fall under? Well we have to go back to the RIAA awards of 1964 and the later Universal belated certifications from the late nineties to make an informed judgement. As I’ve pointed out, just seven singles were able to qualify under the [[still) strict rules criteria the auditors had to work under in 1964. We’ll ignore the four from the Fab4 because they were – I think we can agree – a law unto themselves in terms of record sales and popularity. So we’re then left with ‘Rag Doll’ by the Four Seasons, ‘Everybody Loves Somebody’ from Dean Martin and finally ‘Oh Pretty Woman’ by the great Roy Orbison.

If only these were able to make the grade then again I would suggest that we need to understand that it was a tough ask to reach one million shipments gross, and accordingly these three will have been before returns were factored in. Leaping forward thirty-odd years to the Universal RIAA certifications it entirely supports the gold records granted for ‘Baby Love’ and ‘Stop! In the Name of Love’ for net shipments between 500,000 and 999,999 copies.

So, logically thinking, the likelihood to me is the JRT list above consists of gross totals, and most likely they were up-to-date too as at the time of the book – 1989.

Now we are only discussing RIAA award concerns here as at 1964, and not how things would have been viewed when the late-nineties awards were considered. In other words, there would almost certainly be free records ‘out there’ that you and I might consider ‘shipments’, and that the RIAA do now, but in all likelihood the paperwork for these could be ‘missing’, for want of a better word. To put it bluntly, if as a label you were trying to both launch a new act and also keep payments down you would offer inducements to One Stops and retailers that were not going to be paid a royalty on. If that was the case, it would equally be in your interests to not keep the records on such give-aways beyond the statutory minimum for IRS or whatever.

This, in my opinion, is the most obvious reasoning behind the failure of Universal in both achieving the expected platinum awards and why they then swiftly decided to pull the plug on the programme.

So for instance, ‘Where Did Our Love Go’ has to be a gross total or else surely the act would have won a belated platinum award for this release? Either that or the information JRT has provided is not the same as that the RIAA auditors were considering for ‘Baby Love’ and the others, or if it was then for some reason it was deemed insufficient. Equally if these details were net it is hard to imagine a problem!

Anyway, as I’ve said before the way I look at all this is there can be no doubt the majority of the Supremes No. 1 hits shipped one million at the time as a total gross, and to me therefore they should all be considered platinum winners. To argue otherwise is being both churlish and harsh in the face of popular approval as measured by the charts, regardless of the niceties of the rules of the RIAA. If we were to go down that route then we would find quite a few old gold discs were never true million-sellers, and that too is spoiling things too much.

The one ‘figure’ [[as it isn’t as such) I would take issue with Florence is the ‘over two million copies eventually sold’ statement for ‘Someday We’ll Be Together’. It would be possible I suppose to make a case for this globally, but in 1969 – even with good Xmas trade – I can’t imagine it exceeding this figure. Again, if it did where is the 2xP RIAA award for starters? There is the Beatles smash ‘Come Together’ that made that grade about the same time, but it was only because it was supported by ‘Something’ on the flip – a double No. 1 in some listings. At a push there would be some demand in later years for such a sentimental parting lyric I guess, but like I say this would still not get it above 2m unless we’re talking gross US or worldwide. I’m happy to listen to any other theories.

Lastly on the Supremes, it is revealing what he states about the other big hits such as ‘Reflections’ [[a personal fave) etc. “did not even come close to selling a million, most sold roughly half of that”. It is pretty much what I have been proposing about the size of mid-sixties single sales generally, is it not?

More next time on La Ross.

[Strange]

Sales for Diana solo:

Reach Out And Touch barely 500k
A'int No Mountain 1,243,748
Remember Me 540,940
Reach Out I'll Be There 254,307
Touch Me In The Morning 1,504,909
Last Time I Saw Him 643,740
Sleepin' 46,162
Do You Know Where You're Going To 882,272
The Boss approx. 250k
It's My Turn 434,794

Some of those figures are so exact that he must have been given them and printed them in good faith. It could be that these were totals shipped before returns were factored in.The Universal certifications in 1997 really muddy the waters. If you take them at face value then aside from "I'm Gonna Make You Love Me" they had only three singles which sold more than 500k - Someday 1m+, Baby Love and Stop! In The Name Of Love".

From what has been said it does seem probable that the Supremes' singles sales in the US are not as high as we were always led to believe and million sellers at the time were quite scarce in the market as a whole so not making the million is plausible but without anything concrete in the way of proof I just don't believe that only those three singles passed 500k. I knew about "Returns" but it would seem the scale was quite big. Could Motown for example in 1964 afford to ship over 1m copies of WDOLG and have over half returned to put the figure below 500k?

Of course, while it is unlikely and why would they? is it all possible Universal decided just to claim on the original standard of 2m for Platinum and 1m for Gold?

It could also be that their is much sales documentation missing but then you have to ask how come there would be so much missing for The Supremes yet apparently they were able to supply it all for The Temptations?

Maybe it is just as simple that contary to the perception that The Supremes were Motown's biggest sellers they were actually well outsold by The Temptations.

It looks to me as if Universal took a decision not to discontinue applying for back cetifications. If the figure for Diana's Touch Me was 1.5m shipped it's hard to believe it didn't do 1m but impossible to believe there could have been 1m returns to put it below the half-million.

Interestingly JRT supplied no figures at all for Diana's RCA sales so if the figures for Motown were not to hos mind authentic he would probably have given figures for those too!

Why did he remove the sales from the updated version of the book? Interestingly in it one record he still claims as a million seller is You Can't Hurry Love.

Off topic but does anyone have any figures for Diana's RCA singles? I have never seen anything at all for them.

Certainly none of them reached 1m but I somehow think Why Do Fools Fall In Love did over 500k and Mirror, Mirror and Muscles would be near to that.

Missing You is interesting. It was on the charts for nearly 6 months but spent the early part yo-yoing around the middle of the Hot 100. Depending on what sort of sales this part of the chart generated the accumulated totals over a large number of weeks could be quite healthy so the total for MY could maybe be surprising.

With regard to Stoned Love in the US I notice BayouMotownMan who apparently has worked out a lot of The Supremes' sales from their chart positions and his knowledge of the American market suggests it did 1.5m.

Right, fed and watered and on to the Diana Ross figures from JRT. Again they appear to be gross in the most part, and I see you have a feeling that is the case when you comment they could be shipments before returns are factored in.

I’ve hopefully explained that had Motown been inclined to back in the day they probably would have been inviting the auditors down regularly for a peak at their books to confirm gold certifications for one million singles shipped. But as with so many, many of the actual awards of the time, they would then have dipped back beneath the required plateau and no-one would have been any of the wiser.

Sadly Berry Gordy preferred to keep his business his business and, as they say, the rest is history. We’ll never know for sure which of their number ones truly would have merited a gold disc at the time. I am generous and for the sake of posterity I’d say all of them should stand as modern day platinum awards, but there is no doubt under the rules in place at the time and even today [[because of lack of freebie paperwork most likely) that would not really have been what happened. To get a proper perspective again about the appallingly low level of most single sales you need to look no further than the lack of a gold disc for ‘Ticket To Ride’ by the Beatles. For even one of their No. 1’s to fail to make the grade underlines how difficult it was – as I keep saying…

And yes, returns were quite big Florence. Sometimes scarily so! There are examples where as much as 40% of the total shipment came back for gold discs winners…so while it might be hard to register that the Supremes first major hit was brought below 500k [[especially as a staunch fan, but even as a staunch-but-fair fan), it is not impossible.

As things stood in the summer of 1964 when ‘Where Did Our Love Go’ was released, Motown had to be pretty anxious that Berry’s ‘favourites’ weren’t getting the breakthrough hit after quite a few tries going back over two years. I would imagine the label were aware they had a really good number and simply had to make it a smash or else…so there would be little doubt that ‘the free’ would have been necessary to get the attention of the dealers and wholesalers after the poor performance of the group’s other releases. That would have meant the maximum 3-for-10 deal [[it was commonplace) and as I’ve said these would not enjoy royalties nor, it seems, would the paperwork be kept so readily for the same reason.

If you then understand that when records are returned the more unscrupulous manufacturers would remove them from the paid-for side of the ledger, well, even if your arithmetic is as bad as mine you’ll realise that it wouldn’t be long to have the ‘net, net’ total slip under that 500k level. JRT is actually telling us that in his other comments about ‘Reflections’ etc. in a roundabout, coded way – and quite brave of him too I might add – and most likely it was realised in the right [[wrong?) places and the re-prints had the figures pulled.

This isn’t a conspiracy theory as it is based on the structures and methods of the time and the comparable award winners and so on as I’ve shown. Proving it is another thing and absolutely why time and time again all these matters are settled out of court – no-one would win, and the Motown name is very valuable to this day not to be assoicated with such sordid practices in the dim and distant past. My poor math says of the 1,072,290 gross for WDOLG, 321,687 were given as freebies, and then of the remaining 750k or so a further 40% might have come back to register a below half-million ‘net, net’ total – around 450,000 – and not even a modern-day gold disc.

That’s how it can work Florence, and ultimately all you and I can do is way up the pro’s and con’s and decide the most likely reason why we do not have more certifications from the Universal programme…for me we can only look at the rivals in 1964 and see that singles didn’t sell as we all imagined and draw the conclusion that neither did Motown. The dot-joining might make a ragged sketch rather than a perfect drawing, but I hope you get the picture!

Your thoughts about the Temptations and Supremes certifications and/or missing papers, depending on your point of view are interesting. I think there is little doubt that the black audiences in the States accepted the Temps more than the Supremes, and consequently the sales to those communities would have been stronger for the former while the latter garnered better airplay results in that all important Top 40 radio land we’ve discussed before. Certainly that is a view that would support the RIAA awards so heavily favouring the Temps, apart from simply the lack of documentation…so you may have hit upon something there. As long as we aren’t looking for reasons to fly in the face of what we seem to now know it can’t be dismissed in my view.

‘Touch Me In the Morning’ is a big total but again perfectly in-keeping with the way things were going crazy in the seventies as each label sent out more and more singles, both to get the upper hand on the competition [[freebies again) and also to have the product on hand should the hit ‘break’ big. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the US is unique in size and distribution terms and the product has to be ready when the public want it. None of this little island and ‘wait and see’ mentality that is the norm in the British market for instance! But the figure for TMITM will be gross for exactly the same reason as I outlined above – Motown needed it to be a hit after some ‘flops’ and shipped and induced accordingly. I can almost guarantee it!

Oh, and the same would be the case with ‘Ain’t No Mountain’ too, except the push was of course to stabilise the faltering launch. The other aspect of all this is of course the personal factor between Diana and Berry that may have meant paperwork was treated differently at the time, or in later years treated less kindly. That is conjecture that is emotional so I wouldn’t stand by it necessarily but as you say it is weird no Diana retrospective awards, isn’t it? There should be a handful of golds and maybe the odd platinum from her Motown work in the 70s – possibly including TMITM, though I sense not.

I saw BayouMotownMan's 1.5m for 'Stoned Love' and his knowledge of the US market might be good at other times but not on this occasion. If you go with him you have to ignore all I've just said and what JRT has let slip...

As for RCA, I can’t help and I suspect from what I’ve just read elsewhere Hotspurman for one won’t be able to either!

[Sugarchilehoneybaby]

What I am certain about is that Billboard was regarded as much more reliable than Cashbox which was much more reliable than Record World.

Cashbox might have been airplay only..........but that I am not at all sure of anymore.

I have perhaps a less interesting post than the ones above me regarding the JRT sales figures, but I wanted to address Jobeterob's point about Billboard. I worked in radio for several years and worked with some old-timers from the real days of Top 40 radio in America, and actually Cash Box was considered the magazine that was the most reflective of real sales, and therefore the ones that PD's looked to in determining their playlists. Billboard was NOT - I repeat, NOT - considered the end-all be-all. The only reason it won out over time was its excellent branding and management. Record World went defunct in April 1982, and Cash Box started to wane at this time as well, finally ending in 1996, but was irrelevant years before that, as Radio & Records arose to become Billboard's closest competitor.

The days that Cash Box reigned were definitely the 60s and 70s. And Cash Box did NOT factor radio airplay until the mid/late 70s from what I've been told by actual industry people. Cash Box was a combination of sales and JUKEBOX play, until the Juke Box medium finally waned. [[Crazy to think of a bunch of mom-n-pops diners and such reporting their top played jukebox records to Cash Box, but it's true! This would explain why Motown and other labels put out special jukebox singles and EPs.)

Recall too, that the first radio airplay-only based chart was introduced in 1974. That would be Radio & Records. This publication kept things going until a couple of years ago, when they were bought out by Billboard. Now, we just have Billboard. But it wasn't always so, and in its formative years, Billboard was the underdog.

Lastly, people referencing the genre-specific charts should know a couple of things. Again - this coming from someone connected to the radio industry.

The first thing everyone needs to know is that every chart, including the Hot 100, was in fact genre-specific. The Hot 100 NEVER included genre stations outside of CHR [[Contemporary Hit Radio, aka what we call "Top 40" or "Pop") until 1999. [[Yes, 1999. In that year, they introduced a number of genre stations added to mix of BDS/Soundscan data, including Latin stations, as that was the year of the "Latin explosion.") The only sub-genre it included was "Churban" [[CHR, but heavily slanted towards youth-oriented R&B) added at the height of the New Jack Swing era, in 1990/'91. These CHuRban stations [[one of the pioneers was B-96) differentiated themselves from Urban stations [[aka "Black") in that they did not play the Urban Adult Contemporary songs and focused on rhythm. The other name for this radio genre was "Rhythm Crossover". So basically, these stations would play TLC but not Regina Belle, for example.

Now, The "Hot" or "Power" radio genre in the mid-to-late 80s focused on pop-oriented dance music. Artists like Madonna and Michael and Janet Jackson were mainstays of this genre and actually drove the format, and it was pop [[i.e. "white") focused.

In regards to C&W, the Country charts have been an airplay-only chart for a LONG time, since around the mid-80s. Country singles were never a huge market, and actually largely regional in the 60s and early 70s. The goal was to sell albums. So, a #1 C&W single was pretty much based on airplay, and since those stations reported to the editors of the Country charts and NOT the Hot/Top 100 [["Pop") charts, that airplay, combined with minimal singles sales, would not make a song a crossover hit unless that song got played on CHR/Pop stations. What was required for Country hits to become big crossover Pop hits, was to be recorded by big name stars who appealed outside the very conservative, largely regional [[at that time) C&W audience. It wasn't until the late 70s that we saw the rise of Country stars who became crossover Pop stars: Kenny Rogers, Dolly Parton, Ronnie Milsap, etc. who were able to do that.

Back to the R&B charts, the biggest time for non-crossover R&B #1s wasn't the 70s, but the mid-to-late 80s, and the songs that were the usual culprits were Urban Adult Contemporary songs [[slow jams, quiet storm); hence the rise of the afore-mentioned "CHurban" format.

Now, as for R&B singles sales, what Billboard used in its reporting for the Soul/Black/R&B chart, until the early 90s, were a list of only about 60-100 independently-owned record stores [[many of which were Black-owned) located specifically in Urban areas. What that means is that a #1 on the Black Singles chart didn't necessarily sell a lot of singles either, because the buyers were mainly Black, specifically inner city record buyers who frequented these independent music stores. There were no chains like Sam Goody or Title Wave reporting to the Black/R&B Singles editor at Billboard. This is why, back in the day, I had to shop at these stores to get the singles and often albums I wanted, because you usually couldn't find those titles at the mall or at a major chain. Even 20 years ago, a non-crossover #1 R&B single probably sold less than 100K.

What we've seen in the last 20 years in the U.S. is the corporate consolidation of just about everything. It's in the endgame of real-life monopoly, hence why we see less choices for what we actually want to listen to.

[Strange]

A fantastic contribution earlier Roger, and I’m glad you have found it interesting enough to delve deeper into the topic of record sales generally, even if we are straying far away from those of ‘Stoned Love’ or even Motown itself. I expect to be ejected at any minute for being totally off-topic, but here goes!


Well then, I'm certainly finding this a very interesting thread, yet are we anywhere nearer to actually answering the original question about how many copies "Stoned Love" actually sold?

No, we’ll never be able to answer that conundrum precisely Roger, but I am most certain that what I have suggested is the nearest to the answer that we are going to get.


In spite of what has been written here by Strange I can't help but feel that something is hugely wrong. Basically, I have great difficulty in believing the figures given for cumulative US record sales in the '60s, they same way too low to me.

I also find difficulty in believing that US total sales and/or production of singles actually rose by 60% between 1964 and 1969 from 99 to 157 million, when conventional wisdom has this as a period when sales of 45s were either flat or decreasing.

In Britain at that time unit sales of LPs were increasing every year and those of 45s were decreasing every year, and I find it difficult to believe that the US was so different.

Equally it is perfectly fine to doubt what I’m saying, and I’d be concerned if someone, somewhere, didn’t think something was ‘hugely wrong’! We are often easily blinded by facts and figures from representative industry associations and their allies in the media; it is the also in our nature to exaggerate and admire success. When these things basic human traits are combined and added to misinformation overload, well the outcome is logic and reality become blurred if not suspended.

Now, the data you have successfully googled is quite well known in circles who contemplate this sort of stuff, and similar breakdowns were part of another epic analytical synopsis of the record industry by the well respected expert Simon Frith. Which originated first I’m not sure, but basically they are the same and sourced from the various worldwide recording industry bodies under the auspices of the IFPI, so for want of trying we are not going to get much more detail than this all these years later. Luckily, and maybe you feel the same, all I’m bothered about really are the US and UK statistics and these were collected to an acceptable standard for the day.

But it is there that we really need to understand who is supplying the figures, how they might be trying to ‘spin’ them, and ultimately to cut through all the propaganda fog and break the numbers down so we can see what they really mean. For instance, the RIAA are very keen to speak in dollar terms as you noted, but have you noticed that they prefer to use the recommended dollar list price in their totals? In other words, they are choosing to promote the highest value possible for the industries products when attributing income value, when no-one at retail ever pays anywhere near these prices, let alone the actual figure paid by One Stops or Rackjobbers. The brutal truth is the RIAA dollar statistics have always presented a very false picture of the actual value of the recorded music industry in the US, some claim over fifty per cent to the upside! But more of that later.

For now, all I can tell you is the 1964 and 1969 unit numbers I gave you were from the RIAA. You are right to find it hard to believe because, as you say the conventional wisdom denies that there was a growth of 60% or so in single sales, but then Roger you and everyone else are thinking in the terms the industry want you to think by looking at the figures for what they are and thinking in terms of sales and not shipments. Although there were over-shipments and returns in the early days of the rock era, the rise of the album and the need to promote the single to draw attention to the more expensive LP meant by the late sixties the practice was getting out of hand.

That aside, the RIAA awards programme evidence is again more than clear about the growth in the singles market during those five years. As I’ve mentioned 1964 saw just seven gold discs awarded, whereas by 1969 the total had steadily risen to a new height of 64 singles that were confirmed as shipping one million units. Again I could expand laboriously on this but I’m not gonna get paid for writing a thesis so without a specific question I’ll refrain for everyone’s sake!

As for the UK, the singles market did decline markedly but the circumstances in 63/4 were entirely unique as I’ve mentioned before. All that was happening was a return to the more staid levels prior to the Merseybeat and group explosion which, being homegrown, was even more dramatic in unit sales than the US. The album market in Britain grew as it did in the States, but the UK did not have the marketing or geographical pressures that required massive over-shipments which was the main reason single shipments did do the opposite to what you suspect.

Ok, back to the RIAA and their figures that admittedly are annoyingly presented in most instances as dollar values. As I mentioned the plain fact is they are a trade organisation out to promote their members and the wider industry so they perhaps can’t be blamed for presenting their statistics in the best light possible. Cash Box wrote a very revealing piece about this in February 1976 headlined ‘How Large Is the Recording Industry? New Figures Indicate a $2.2 Billion Myth’ in which they showed how the 1974 data [[$2.2b) was in fact only worth some $850-950 million at manufacturer’s realised prices. The point is this is still not the whole truth as the RIAA deals in shipments as we know, and the data therefore takes no account of returns, and in the case of many albums they can simply sit on the dealer’s shelves unsold to be returned in later years. The phrase smoke and mirrors comes to mind!

Now, your table indicates the units shipped came to 539.9m, which is again annoyingly made up of albums and singles. It is also incorrect – probably a typo – as the total for 1974 was in fact 593.9m units shipped. Well I can tell you the singles shipments out of this number were 204m, just shy of the all-time high of 228m in 1973, while the LPs accounted for 276m with 8-track cartridges an impressive 96.7m and other tapes coming in at 17.2m. Meanwhile, gold singles had not risen much since 1969 with 68 awarded in 1974.

All of which numerical gobbledegook means that where it counts – at least for observers like me and not the money-men – we can see that unit production of singles were still increasing and were now 100% above 1964. The equivalent album [[and tape) production in 1964 had been 146m, and was by 1974 about 170% higher.

The UK calculation you’ve made of 59m for albums in 1969 is correct [[actually 59,565,000), but once again as I said before these are Board of Trade figures that cover all the records manufactured in Great Britain, so unless you know the exports it is only an indication. Further, the total by then is increasingly reflecting the budget album sector [[as of course is the US number) and this will skew the comparison with 1964. And again as I mentioned elsewhere, the singles total in 1964 is for all 45-rpm production so while you are right that EPs weren’t much of a factor in 1969 Roger, they very much were five years earlier. The 28m is just LPs.

[Strange]

As to the US dollar based figures, do these equate to the published RIAA estimates if retail prices of singles and LPs are factored in?

If so, there is an interesting footnote at the bottom of the international figures ..

"Note: For most countries, the figures refer to sales by IFPI member companies only."

Now, the IFPA mentioned here is the "International Federation of the Phonographic Industry", of which bodies such as the RIAA [[in the US) and BPI [[in the UK) are affiliates.

So .. it looks like these figures are for RIAA and BPI members only.

And yet Motown [[along with a lot of other American "independent" record labels) weren't in the RIAA in the '60s, which means that if the total US figures are only for RIAA members they are being seriously underestimated.

It would be extremely interesting to know what percentage of US singles sales were from companies NOT affiliated with RIAA in the 1960s and early 1970s.

I think this actually highlights a crucial difference between the UK and US recording industries in the 1960s. In the US there were a whole host of independent labels capable of generating big selling hits.

In the UK the 1960s recording industry was dominated by EMI, Pye and Decca, all of whom were essentially electronics companies with record divisions. Then there was Philips [[a Dutch based electronics company) and US outfits such as RCA, CBS and Warner Brothers.

Very few UK chart hits in the mid '60s were on labels that that were not owned or operated by these large corporations, whose main business was more about making radios, televisions or movies rather than selling records. In contrast most of those 1960s US record companies were just that .. record companies!!

There were some British independents .. Oriole for example, which for a while distributed Motown, Sue .. which released R&B and Soul aimed at "Mods" and labels such as Bluebeat and Island that issued Jamaican Ska recordings, but none of these had many major sellers.

Things did change somewhat after 1967 when independents like Major-Minor, Island and President started to get chart hits, and when the German Polydor label made inroads [[largely through its licensing material from Atlantic records in New York) and even more in 1969 when a number of Rocksteady/Reggae records on independent labels such as Trojan made the UK charts.

The point I'm trying to make is that the 1960s UK recording industry was a lot more "Corporate" than the US one. Maybe this is why the sales figures are considered a lot more trustworthy.

Roger

Moving on, if I understand your comment about the US dollar based figures I have already addressed that by explaining about the RIAA choosing to use list prices when calculating the industry’s earnings. It is thoroughly misleading. If that isn’t what you were asking please re-state it.

As for the note about the figures relating to IFPI members only, well that is quite astute and would be relevant if we were considering somewhere like Italy or Mexico but not again the US or UK. Both did not have complete membership by any stretch of the imagination, but the coverage was very high [[I have lists) and what they didn’t have they made allowances for as appropriate. It only matters for the RIAA really during the sixties as you say with Motown, because the BPI is only relevant from 1973 and prior to that ALL companies were required to provide data to the relevant Government department – the aforementioned Board of Trade. I believe I said elsewhere it was on a monthly basis if you recall.

Consequently the RIAA estimates for US record domestic shipments [[interestingly they did eliminate exports, probably because they weren’t a disinterested Government Dept.) took account of non-reporting companies, and in 1964 it came to 245m units made up of 99m singles and 146m albums at a total list price value of $758m. They gave this a weighted total of 166m, which compares with the 1969 equaivalent of 338, although that is probably not of much use to us.

So while you are correct that there were differences between the two countries in terms of the number of independent labels, the final published results in the States took account of this and it is actually other problems with the data that need to be addressed. How accurate they were is an entirely different matter Roger but I have been providing the correct relevant figures from the respective organisations. What you have to remember is despite the fact there were dozens more record companies in the States, they were indeed not only small outfits who never [[or seldom) had a big selling hit, but more importantly they often had their records pressed by the majors. That data was available for the RIAA to use.

So even though the UK was more ‘corporate’ as you say, the quality of the statistical information from both sides of the pond is both satisfactory and suspect to the same degree. It is all we have, and all things considered it is probably, faults and all, a good representation of the markets at the time.