Top 10 Titans

THE ALBUM ACHIEVERS ON THE BILLBOARD CHARTS

Which of the Motown superstars sold the most albums during the company’s golden age?

      Stevie Wonder, surely, with his extraordinary burst of Grammy-garlanded releases in the 1970s? Or the greatest girl-group of all time, the Supremes, fuelled by their electrifying sequence of Number One singles during the ’60s? But wait: what about the Temptations, whose inventory of Top 10 albums spans both decades?

      It may never be possible to know for certain. After all, who has access to such information? Are the sales statistics locked up somewhere in the Motown Museum? (Didn’t Esther Edwards keep everything?)

Celebrating Little Stevie’s triumph in Billboard

      Also, Motown didn’t begin applying for official gold and platinum certifications from the Recording Industry Association of America until the 1980s, and even then, it only got a relatively small number of long-players certified that decade.

      So did MCA obtain the album sales information when it bought the company for $61 million in 1988? (One assumes so.) And did all that intel pass to PolyGram when it paid $301 million for Motown Records five years later? Or what about Universal Music, when it devoured PolyGram in 1998? They must have a pretty good idea, right?

      Then again, who’s going to share it with us, even if it is collated in one wondrous place? (The long-locked safe of the late Noveck brothers?)

      In the absence of definitive data, the numbers gnomes at West Grand Blog have been ploughing through the Billboard album charts, and, specifically, using the Top 10 of that weekly countdown to arrive at some conclusions. The period under review is 1959-88, when the magazine’s LP charts were shaped primarily from information acquired by calling record retailers and rackjobbers (who were essentially wholesalers) for a list of their top sellers every week.

      How close to reality were the resulting charts? Not as close as when Soundscan electronically tracked across-the-counter sales (via bar codes) from 1991 onwards. “The old chart couldn’t begin to touch the democracy of this chart,” said Billboard editor-in-chief Timothy White the following year. “There’s no question that our old system was subject to manipulation, and that people abused it.”

      Leaving aside such hindsight, the first Motown release to reach Number One on the main Billboard album chart (which numbered 150 positions at the time) was Little Stevie Wonder’s Recorded Live: The 12 Year Old Genius, in the week ending August 24, 1963. Decades later, I asked Motown’s sales supremo, Barney Ales, how many copies it sold, but he couldn’t recall with accuracy: somewhere close to 200,000 copies was his best guess, once returns were factored in – a remarkable enough number for what was then still a small company. Contrast that with the five million sales of Songs In The Key of Life, as certified by the RIAA in 2005 (the set’s two discs meant that it qualified as ten times platinum for that award).

      One other point: what follows is a snapshot of the U.S. market alone. Large quantities of Motown albums were sold abroad during the company’s heyday, particularly in the U.K. and Canada, but those aggregate totals are in that Motown Museum cupboard, if anywhere.

METHODOLOGY AND MORE

      OK, enough preamble. Below is a ranking of the ten Motown acts who apparently sold the most albums during its founder’s reign. As noted, this is based on the Top 10 of the Billboard Top LPs chart (later called the Top 200 Albums). The WGB methodology assigns points for each album’s chart peak – so, 100 points for Number One – and adds points for the number of chart weeks. Thus, the Supremes’ Where Did Our Love Go earns 99 points for its No. 2 peak in January 1965, and an additional 89 points for its total number of chart weeks.

      By this measure, Stevie Wonder rules. The ranking shows the chart peak of each act’s Top 10 album (they’re listed in chronological order), followed by its number of weeks on the overall chart, and the number of points earned under this methodology. There’s additional commentary after this data, in case you haven’t had sufficient. 

STEVIE WONDER (1523 points)

#1 Recorded Live: The 12 Year Old Genius (20 weeks, 120 points)

#3 Talking Book (109 weeks, 207 points)

#4 Innervisions (89 weeks, 186 points)

#1 Fulfillingness’ First Finale (65 weeks, 165 points)

#1 Songs In The Key of Life (80 weeks, 180 points)

#4 Stevie Wonder’s Journey Through The Secret Life of Plants (22 weeks, 119 points)

#3 Hotter Than July (40 weeks, 138 points)

#4 Stevie Wonder’s Original Musiquarium I (28 weeks, 125 points)

#4 The Woman In Red (40 weeks, 137 points)

#5 In Square Circle (50 weeks, 146 points)

THE TEMPTATIONS (1414 points)

#5 Greatest Hits (120 weeks, 216 points)

#10 Temptations Live! (51 weeks, 142)

#7 With A Lot O’ Soul (36 weeks, 130 points)

#2 Diana Ross & The Supremes Join The Temptations (32 weeks, 131 points)

#1 TCB (34 weeks, 134 points)

#4 Cloud Nine (40 weeks, 137 points)

#5 Puzzle People (41 weeks, 137 points)

#9 Psychedelic Shack (30 weeks, 122 points)

#2 All Directions (44 weeks, 143 points)

#7 Masterpiece (28 weeks, 122 points) 

THE SUPREMES (1206 points)

#2 Where Did Our Love Go (89 weeks, 188 points)

#6 More Hits By The Supremes (37 weeks, 132 points)

#8 I Hear A Symphony (55 weeks, 148 points)

#1 The Supremes A’ Go-Go (60 weeks, 160 points)

#6 The Supremes Sing Holland-Dozier-Holland (29 weeks, 124 points)

#1 Greatest Hits (89 weeks, 189 points)

#2 Diana Ross & The Supremes Join The Temptations (32 weeks, 131 points)

#1 TCB (34 weeks, 134 points) 

MARVIN GAYE (678 points)

#6 What’s Going On (53 weeks, 148 points)

#2 Let’s Get It On (61 weeks, 160 points)

#8 Marvin Gaye Live! (28 weeks, 121 points)

#4 I Want You (28 weeks, 125 points)

#3 Live At The London Palladium (26 weeks, 124 points) 

THE COMMODORES (674 points)

#3 Commodores (53 weeks, 151 points)

#3 Commodores Live! (28 weeks, 126 points)

#3 Natural High (33 weeks, 131 points)

#3 Midnight Magic (41 weeks, 139 points)

#7 Heroes (33 weeks, 127 points) 

LIONEL RICHIE (656 points)

#3 Lionel Richie (140 weeks, 238 points)

#1 Can’t Slow Down (160 weeks, 260 points)

#1 Dancing On The Ceiling (58 weeks, 158 points) 

DIANA ROSS (557 points)

#1 Lady Sings The Blues (54 weeks, 154 points)

#5 Touch Me In The Morning (28 weeks, 124 points)

#5 Diana Ross (32 weeks, 128 points)

#2 Diana (52 weeks, 151 points) 

THE JACKSON 5 (549 points)

#5 Diana Ross Presents The Jackson 5 (32 weeks, 128 points)

#4 ABC (50 weeks, 147 points)

#4 Third Album (50 weeks, 147 points)

#7 Lookin’ Through The Windows (33 weeks, 127 points) 

SMOKEY ROBINSON & THE MIRACLES (271 points)

#8 Going To A Go-Go (40 weeks, 133 points)

#7 Greatest Hits Vol. 2 (44 weeks, 138 points) 

RICK JAMES (172 points)

#3 Street Songs (74 weeks, 172 points) 

      Worth noting from the above is the chart longevity of Lionel Richie’s first two solo albums, at 160 weeks and 140 weeks, respectively. Also – more than 15 years earlier in a smaller album market – the Temptations’ Greatest Hits, at 120 weeks. The shortest run is that of Stevie Wonder’s Recorded Live: The 12 Year Old Genius, at 20 weeks.

More than two years on the Billboard charts

      There are a further five Motown acts who reached the Billboard Top 10 in the survey period, with one album apiece: the Four Tops (Greatest Hits), Michael Jackson (Ben), Gladys Knight & the Pips (Neither One Of Us), Jermaine Jackson (Let’s Get Serious) and Smokey Robinson (Being With You).

      When the survey is extended to those with Top 20 albums, the ranking is not hugely different – with one important distinction: the Temptations depose Stevie Wonder as the Motown act with the most qualifying releases. From 1967-73, the group reached the Billboard Top 20 with 19 titles, compared to Wonder’s 12. Whether the Temps sold more albums in total than Stevie during their Hitsville years is debatable, but we’ll never know unless someone opens that file cabinet.

      Missing from any Top 20 action, unfortunately, are Martha (Reeves) & the Vandellas, the Marvelettes and Jr. Walker & the All Stars. Rare Earth secured two albums in the Top 20, and there were a further eight acts who placed one: the Dazz Band, DeBarge, Thelma Houston, Eddie Kendricks, the Mary Jane Girls, Rockwell, Mary Wells and, er, Bruce Willis (thank you, Jay Lasker). Two soundtrack albums also peaked inside the Top 20: The Big Chill and Mahogany.

      One final point: this survey’s chart-based timespan obviously does not take into account the volume of classic Motown albums sold (or streamed) in subsequent years – what the record industry calls “catalogue” business. On that score, you can bet that What’s Going On and Songs In The Key of Life, among others, continue to ramp up the numbers.

      In other words, the music is timeless.