Supremes sales figures

[helga]

I doubt these are true sales figures. If anything, they indicate how many copies were shipped to the record stores, but not how many copies were purchased by consumers.

[jobeterob]

Well, thanks Florence for the site; as others have said, who knows. Anything is possible. We all know chart position doesn't often mean alot. Christmas sales do mean something. Shipments don't mean they all sold.

[copley]

Florence, we are going to have to agree to disagree over these figures which have no bearing in reality whatsoever. I know a lot about the UK market as I live there and have followed sales trends/charts since the late '60's. I can't prove it but then neither can it be disproved - 'Silk Electric' has not sold 100K in the UK. It's not just Supremes & Diana Ross figures that are inaccurate, figures for many other artists that I looked at are also way out! I've showed this to friends in the business and their reaction was to laugh. The compiler needs to back up these figures with accurate sources otherwise they are totally meaning less.

[Strange]

Having looked at that site too Copley it certainly seems to be the figment of someone's wildest imaginations!

The more recent estimates might be better as they seem to be in-line with the official figures we can all access but few of us bother to tally [[at least for so many acts). But the historical information just has to be complete guesses, and certainly without any explanation as to the method or reasoning it is no more than a great read/good laugh depending on your view of the totals given.

It would be good to get the author to defend it though as I don't like to knock so much work out-of-hand.

[Bokiluis]

This seems about right in my understanding. Record companies often had to give away a good number of albums/singles to the record retail chains to offset the costs of advertising and promotion. So say for example, Tower Records ran a national ad for the "Love Child" album, most likely, labels gave the wholesale costs of product to pay for those ads. So if it costs $25k to run national ads on the "Love Child" album, Motown would give them $25k worth of "Love Child" albums to pay for it. Those copies, known as "free goods", could not be calculated for royalties because they were free. So often, those records would sell thousands more than what the RIAA figures were. It was customary for most labels to do business that way. But it was also one of the reasons why Motown probably didn't like RIAA reps looking into their accounting practices. But understand, that was how most of the labels paid for advertising or at least supplemented ad costs with these goods.

[Strange]

What you say about free copies is true enough Bokiluis, but the RIAA allow them to be counted in the shipments that go towards the certification level.

Quite simply the old sales figures given for the Supremes on here [[and on that Fan of Music site generally that Florence linked to), are far too high. Common sense tells us that and so too does the reality of what sold best at the time - the Beatles and Elvis. They have been subjected to plenty of audits and sales trawls that show million selling singles were not easy to come by even in the States, nevermind multi-million sellers.

And for whatever reason, the Motown sound didn't really transfer into mega-sales overseas and would have represented 20% of the US total at best [[except for the odd exception) in the sixties.