You know, if a band on a label sold a few hundred thousand copies of their record these days, they wouldn't make any money. But if a band can pump out 10 million copies of a record for free, and 50,000 of those fans come to the band's website to watch pay-per-view videos or buy a t-shirt, that's roughly $10 million in revenue per year.
It's a blessing and a curse when your first big public album does so well. 'Twentysomething' sold four million copies - I think we were hoping to sell 80,000. And it's still selling. In some ways, you'll always be defined by that.
I heard a quote once in a documentary about a band that said you're better off owning everything 100 percent and selling 20,000 copies of an album than signing with a record company and selling a million copies. There has never been a truer statement about show business than that.
Our first album sold a million copies. Because we had such a big hit on the first album, it's always like, 'You can't top the first album.'
I sometimes think 'Gordon' must be the most bootlegged album in U.S history, since it sold only 200,000 copies in the country, yet 800,000 kids know the words to every song.
The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band
'X-Force' #1 sold 5 million copies. By default, the second issue dipped and did 1.3 million copies. But the cover of 'X-Force' #2 is Deadpool. It's not X-Force, It's Deadpool.
My biggest frustration is the lack of scale in the music industry. The fact that no one has sold 100 million copies of an album is frustrating.
I know acts and I'm not going to name names but these people sold ten million copies the first time and the second album sells three million and it's considered a failure and they're dropped and that's really a shame.
This comes from Mike Gonzalez at the Daily Signal: [ Howard] Zinn's history "set the stage for the grievance mongering that passes for history classes today, and is still widely used. It has sold over 2 million copies since it was first published in 1980 and continues to sell over 100,000 copies a year because it is required reading at many of our high schools and colleges. That's a lot of young minds."
Raoul' sold a respectable 700,000 copies without a hit single. It didn't take off. If you don't sell 8 million albums or 4 million albums again, everybody deems it a big failure.
We always thought if 'Beauty and the Beat' sold even 100,000 copies, we'd be real happy and a successful group, so when it reached a million... Hey, we just laughed about it.
To have a No. 1 with 130,000 copies sold is, you know, I remember when we first started selling records, in order to have a No. 1, you'd have to sell at least a half a million if not more, for the rock side of things.
The 'Frampton' album sold better than all of the other solo records that I'd had, put together. It was over 300,000 copies, so that was a good signal that we were poised for my first gold record.
Before MTV, if you put out an album that sold 50,000 copies, your band could afford not to have day jobs for a while. That meant you could stick around, put out another album or two. Maybe it would be the second or third album where you'd make the statement you'd been trying to make all along.
Obviously, there are those in the industry who don't give romance novels the level of respect the sales would warrant. They'll talk about a book that sells maybe 100,000 copies, that happens to be very literary, whereas something like 'Crossfire' will sell 13 million copies in a single language and hardly get any mentions at all.