140 million
 

I’ve often wondered how it was calculated that Fleetwood Mac has sold over 140 million albums. Here is a link that seems to answer that question.

https://chartmasters.org/2017/10/bes...f-all-time/18/

FM is #25 on the list at 148 million plus. If you click on Fleetwood Mac the link takes you to a 32 page rundown of sales, streams,downloads, etc for all of their albums. Pretty exhaustive analysis with interesting conclusions if you’re into statistics.

Wow...this is a really interesting site. Thanks for this.
Interesting- in the comments section on the Fleetwood Mac pages there's discussion about how Fleetwood Mac aren't as well known around the world as The Police or ABBA. I hadn't considered that, but now that makes total sense.
Some really interesting sales figure for the older albums.

100% True. Fleetwood Mac wasn't so popular in Peru, and I would say all South America. Maybe my generation people know FM (at least those who listen rock/pop music). But ABBA, Police, Queen and Rolling Stones are far more popular, even within my generation. And of course also in older or younger people.

ABBA are my other all time favorite band from my youth. I saw them live for the first and only time in late 1979 weeks before I saw Fleetwood Mac for the first time. What a way to end the 1970s.

I love how much early stuff outsold SYW. That album still bugs me.

Incredibly detailed 32 pages of work that brings into focus sales data for albums and singles and goes deep into streaming and download data using sophisticated analytics. This data only runs through mid 2016, so 4.5 years later has surely added to the numbers.

I posted a brief summary of worldwide album sales below. All data courtesy of Chartmasters.org


1968 Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac – 1,600,000
1968 Mr. Wonderful – 1,100,000
1969 Then Play On – 2,000,000
1970 Kiln House – 800,000
1971 Future Games – 800,000
1972 Bare Trees – 1,850,000
1973 Penguin – 700,000
1973 Mystery To Me – 1,600,000
1974 Heroes Are Hard To Find – 1,300,000
1975 Fleetwood Mac – 9,400,000
1977 Rumours – 35,500,000
1979 Tusk – 6,600,000
1982 Mirage – 5,500,000
1987 Tango In The Night – 11,300,000
1990 Behind The Mask – 2,750,000
1995 Time – 150,000
2003 Say You Will – 1,600,000
Live-2,200,000
The Dance - 7,400,000
Greatest Hits - 19,300,000
25 Years The Chain - 650,000
The Very Best of Fleetwood Mac- 6,100,000

Also interesting that BTM sold over a million more that SYW.

I think that BTM was still riding the long coattails of Tango outside of the U.S. Domestically it sold the same or less than SYW.

Also noticed that the five Bob Welch era albums sold more than the original era albums by 750K, making his exclusion all the more criminal.

It's at least a band album (BTM). But the production on both albums are a mess. There's nothing cohesive about SYW. I try and try to get through it and can't. And you know I"m old school with listening to albums.

For every bit of freshness Lindsey delivers on BuckVie, SYW sounds labored and clunky. And that's for sure not all his fault. I saw him try to place the direction of it, and they all were over it.

I've often said that there aren't any Lindsey songs that I hate, but that's because I forget about the clunker that is SYW. It's not just Lindsey, though. Come, Murrow, Silver Girl, Illume... they all SUCK. FM sucks without Christine.

BuckVie is the antithesis of SYW. Thank god.

Comparing Behind the Mask sales to Say You Will sales without context is an incongruent argument. Behind the Mask represented a 77% drop in sales from the prior original release by the band just 3 years earlier. Thirteen years later, in a reshaped record buying market, Say You Will was a 40% drop from Behind the Mask, but a 1100% increase in sales from their last full work of original material, Time, which was released 8 years prior. Of course in the interim, they had the massive selling live compilation, The Dance.

The debate on the listening enjoyment one has from Say You Will is a worthy one. While ambitious, it is long, laborious, and sonically compressed to my ears. That's does not mean their are not some nice moments on the album. The perfect lock of the Fleetwood drums and McVie bass arranged in a distinctly Buckingham way on Miranda. Thrown Down, Steal Your Heart Away and Bleed to Love Her are all well crafted songs. A matter of fact, the album version of Bleed To Lover Her is by far the most streamed track from Say You Will. But yes, in my opinion Say You Will is a tough listen as an entire body of work.

There are other interesting tales of tape in the numbers. Tusk outsold Mirage, despite the perception that Mirage was a return to commercial form. Tusk being the eagerly awaited follow up to Rumours, for sure helped its sales though. The massive sales of Tango in the Night can't be undersold. Buckingham's producer royalties on that one, which I am sure were weighted heavily towards him and not 50 / 50 with Dashut, must have sustained him long into the 90s, when combined with his artist and songwriting royalties. Greatest Hits and The Very Best of Fleetwood Mac have much greater sales volume than I suspected. As noted above, the Welch era was far more successful than perceived, but all of those albums combined don't come to equal the sales of the White Album, so it is easy to see why some members of the band so easily discarded the era.

Lots of interesting data and always a joy to find something new in what I thought I knew.

I love SYW, I bought it late ...from a charity shop, maybe 2006.
It took me another 5 years to really get into it.
But I like that, it wasn’t an instant thing, it grew and grew on me..
I play it a lot really loud, especially in the car.

It truly has it's moments, much like BTM. But as an album, it really fails on so many levels for me.

Completely agree with this paragraph.

About half of it would make for a cohesive Fleetwood Mac album. I can’t imagine the point of it being longer, the double album thing.