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.

To me it is Stevie's best solo album, all nine of those tracks are amazing to listen to.

She has a couple clunkers, but I rather like her songs on this album. (strange I know) WTWCT is a horrible way to start the album. It's such a dud.

IT is partly due to Lindsey's ability to make a sonic silk purse out of a sow's ear. Silver Girl under any other producer's touch would be horrendous. On SYW it manages to have a weird charm. The title track SYW and illume the same. Most of the attraction to those is the atmosphere and arrangement.

^I think Silver Girl is Stevie's best song. Lyrically it's superb. I love the opening and then the roving guitar throughout. Stevie and Sheryl on the chorus are great too.

WTWCT is a horrible sounding song, it hurts my ears on so many levels.

i'm always impressed with the musical diversity of FM fans, and i think that's maybe the most clearly expressed when discussing SYW: SYW has several different styles that are a part of FM all put up against one another -

• your more classical Rumours-era sounding songs (the ones that most people argue should have been the only songs on that album such as SYHA, Thrown Down and BTLH),
• typical LB later style songs, and
• typical Stevie later style songs.

so people who like FM Rumours era sound are selecting and arguing a certain set of songs were the only songs that should have been on the album. people who are mainly fans of Stevie like stuff like Illume and her other songs on SYW. Christine fans cannot even listen to SYW, they miss the smooth FM glue that she is. and Lindsey fans like me adore Lindsey songs on SYW.

i became Lindsey fan that i am after hearing bootleg GOS. i still think that was probably his strongest set of songs, interesting both musically and lyrically. so i adore SYW as an album because of those Lindsey songs. and because the sound of those songs is redefining Fleetwood Mac as evolving and musically viable and fresh band, while still true to themselves.

that said, i do have to admit that as an album, SYW has no coherence and makes no sense. i tried and tried, but besides severely disliking WTWCT and Say Goodbye, i cannot make it through most Stevie songs on there. her sound just grates on me. (same as when she comes in on WTWCT - i attempted to give that song a chance, but once she comes in, that just makes it completely unlistenable for me and i have to turn it off).

and of course, i am forever unhappy that original GOS didn't come out as intended. a few of those songs sprinkled on SYW confuse many of middle-of-the-road FM fans, while make fans like me annoyed that there are not enough of them and that they are interspersed with other songs that don't belong. i am forever grateful that at least bootleg GOS exists so i can listen to those songs in order and enjoy them - complete bliss. :nod: :)

the whole coherent GOS would have had a different audience all together, especially if it was pushed out in 1998. if Lindsey had the business acumen to push it through right after the Dance, instead of sitting on it, listening to what WB bras were telling him, and waiting for Stevie to come back to FM from capitalizing on the FM fame rebirths after The Dance reunion. business-wise she was always savvy and smart one, he was always the exact opposite.

see this statement exactly proves my previous post - Christine fan cannot stand SYW. :xoxo::laugh:

re sales comparisons between early stuff and after-2000 stuff - SYW came after napster. a completely different era of music sales. those numbers cannot be compared as apples to apples to numbers before napster.

I think I’m the only one who likes this one.

Her absence is noticeable, however, in the era of playlists, the people who like the Rumours era songs and Christine fans can abridge the album to the point where it becomes very listenable. Lindsey and Stevie picked up some slack by having poppier contributions, namely WTWCT and SYW, that give it some continuity in addition to what we’d normally expect from them.

Wow. And Trouble.

It should have been released in 1998 and credited to Buckingham Fleetwood McVie, further capitalizing on the reunion and setting them up with a way to work as a band without Stevie.

see this is the part of the argument i don't get. they were never working band with Stevie after the reunion. she was clearly not interested (and is still not), FM is just a vehicle for her own name for her. SYW as this whole thread shows was slapped together and negotiated to have the same number of Lindsey and Stevie songs, and was musically incoherent.

after the success of the reunion gave them all back their musical legends cred (vs the old dinosaur laughing stock band aura they had before that), once it became clear Christine was done and Stevie was only interested in solo name, there was no need to try to keep the band going (well other than for Mick, obviously). it was just a colossal 20-year waste of time (making tons of money for all of them and their managers in the process of course, but as fans that does next to nothing for us - other than taking tons of money outta our pockets).

Lindsey should have hired some smart business.PR person and pushed GOS out in 1998.

:confused: Trouble is on SYW?

No. Just…

Oh, nevermind.

I agree with much of what was written above and there is a very good point about releasing the GOS album in 1998 and highlighting the Mick and John involvement and Christine was on Bleed to Lover Her and Steal Your Heart Away as well.

Stevie could have gone her own way, choosing to not contribute much in the way of new material. Yet, John, Mick, Lindsey and eventually Christine again could have continued to make and release new material. And when it came time to go out on big tours and make money, the queen could return to her throne.

New music doesn't sell much anymore and who cares? Musicians like to create. Let them do that. And as for Stevie not being part of the new material but touring, again these tours aren't about challenging the audience. Its 80% people who want to hear their greatest hits plus the Chain, Gold Dust Woman, Second Hand News, etc.

Lindsey had had his fill of being a solo artist after OOTC. Given a choice, he would have only done Fleetwood Mac albums after he rejoined. After the SYW tour, when another Fleetwood Mac album was off the table, Fleetwood Mac was how he funded the small machine.

As for Stevie, Fleetwood Mac gave her an outlet to make touring money after she saturated her solo shows as much as she possibly could.

And, of course, it’s hard to turn down that much money for a few hours of work, and the ego boost to playing in front of tens of thousands of people.

yep - together and apart. we could have had several albums from BuckVies or Fleetwodmacs or however they'd like to call themselves in the last 20 years, and twice as many LB solo albums, starting from GOS.

and several Rumors 5 Classic FM moneymaking reunions, if necessary. without that whole push-pull waiting-forever do-we-exist / do-we-not-exist as a band crap.

like when Lindsey said he wished they were more like the eagles - FM is a moneymaking business, like The Eagles, only Eagles get that while FM likes to pretend they are also lovey-dovey [long gone] soap opera.

There’s a comment that didn’t age well.

that's a pure speculation, which if true just proves my point that he has no business acumen or savvy whatsoever. so he blew it. he was working on another great solo album after OOTC, he became huge respected name all of the sudden with The Dance, and just needed the right placement and release deal for it.

Not speculation, he actually said that he didn’t need to do another solo album sometime around The Dance.

even as a huge defender of Azoff and ruthless business practices in music, you have to see the difference:

The Eagles replacing a member that died is not equal to Fleetwood Mac trying to metaphorically kill off one of their own and replace him, even if the same Azoff put together both chimeras.

The Fleetwood Mac of 2018 is more similar to The Eagles getting rid of Don Felder then The Eagles on 2018.

didn't he say stuff like that during Tusk era? that he had to do solo albums because FM was not interested in evolving? but that he really just wanted to be in FM?

so if true, when the reunion happened, maybe others in the band promised him that band first plus evolving is what they were willing to do? i wish he stopped being delusional as soon as he saw one of the members leaving the band altogether while another leaving FM in the dust to go resurrect her solo career. :shrug:

That's true, and I'm being cheeky when I state that. :) . But, what impresses me is how BTM sold in Europe. Almost a million copies. I'm not that crazy about BTM, but it does sound more like a band to me.

Even with empirical data, two reasonable people can interpret the information differently. It is my opinion that BTM sales were horrendous in Europe and everywhere else, considering it was just 3 years after Tango in the Night, during the height of the record / cassette / CD buying era and Stevie and Christine were still fronting the band.

Again just my opinion and interpretation and not a dismissal of your interpretation of the numbers.

Understood, I was surprised it sold as well as it had due to Lindsey leaving. I was surprised it broke a million in sales. I truly thought since the FAB 5 were broken, it would be a dud in the cut out section.

While I don't know for sure, I assume many of the posters on this board initially consumed music by terrestrial radio. We listened to countdown shows, read printed music charts and measured songs popularity by their final chart position. A chart position is a snap shot of a song's popularity and promotion at a moment in time. It is not necessarily a measure of a song's enduring popularity or how a song may resonate with a new generation of music consumers. That final chart position also might not be indicative of the continuing royalty revenue a song might generate.

I jumped into the streaming numbers of Fleetwood Mac and found that many songs that were never singles or lower charting singles have had better long term popularity with music consumers than some of their better charting brethren.

Consolidated streaming numbers were updated January 31, 2021. The Dreams phenomenon, which no doubt provided a significant boost to its streaming numbers, was in late September and October 2020. Many music streaming services end their year October 31. A large portion of that gain should be reflected in these numbers.

Song Total Streaming

Go Your Own Way 258,518,000
Dreams 188,229,000
Everywhere 154,221,000
Landslide 138,103,000
The Chain 121,974,000
Rhiannon 91,538,000
Never Goin Back Again 78,637,000
Little Lies 76,257,000
Don't Stop 60,889,000
Gypsy 50,655,000
Second Hand News 48,942,000
You Make Loving Fun 43,949,000
Songbird 41,966,000
Gold Dust Woman 33,655,000
Seven Wonders 33,087,000
Sara 24,872,000
Tusk 24,462,000
Big Love 24,454,000
Silver Springs 22,393,000
Oh Daddy 20,052,000

FYI Over My Head, Say Love Me & Hold Me were all between 10,000,000 and 17,000,000 streams. Highest Pre Rumours streaming song is Albatross at 23,000,000 followed by Black Magic Woman at 14,500,000. No other Pre-Rumours song exceeds 7,000,000 streams and most songs of those various incarnations are between 400,000 and 2,000,000 streams. Highest post Tango streaming songs were As Long as You Follow at 7,500,000, followed by Bleed to Love Her at 4,300,000.

Maybe some numerical perspective of what songs from Fleetwood Mac the modern day music consumer connects with.

very cool, thanks for this.

and yeah after the skateboarding tiktok Dreams went through stratosphere so had to be way above every other ones right now.

Streams were updated 1/30/21 according to the chart.

I'm so out of sync with this forum
 

I thought WtWCT should have been the lead single. I love it!!