Re: Meatloaf Dead..
Reply #13 –
I've always felt those stats are a bit dubious, because it seems to depend heavily on the source of the data and a certain level of continuity in management/ownership.
Do you know how they work the cut off for these figures, or how they are calculated?
The thing that alerted me to an anomaly a few years back was an interview I watched with Elton John. He thanked Australia for buying over 1 million copies of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, yet when I looked it up official sales were only 200,000, but that 200,000 was an "at the time" of release figure and there seems to be no update after many decades ago!
I've also heard recent attributes of bands like Cold Chisel, Australian Crawl and Skyhooks selling close to 1 million of their hit albums in Australia but they never seem to appear in official figures.
The "Bat out of Hell" figures seems to be accumulative, as are many others in that list!
btw, I'm not disputing the figures, I'm just curious that there seems to be such a massive differential from some other obviously huge and very commonly found albums.
Years ago when I worked for the newspapers, one of my mates at work was the editor for the music reviews, back then it was a big part of the weekend papers, he'd claim back then which was in the 80s/90s nobody else's sales even came close to ABBA's sales!
I know what you mean, but I have written two books on this type of music trivia. I always try to fine two independant sources or quotes before including it. A lot of figures are based on charts and records from America, England Australia. The difficulty happened when Asia built a pirate black market which blew out figures. I don't include those...