How much did Bad 25 sell? Was it that bad?
We talked about this a little in the Spike Lee Off The Wall docu thread so let me bring here the relevant parts:
Originally Posted by
ivy
just as a sales reference point though. I think Michael sold 600,000 in USA and they were targeting 200,000 with Bad 25. To me it seemed like a reasonable expectation.
So the Estate/Sony targeted selling 200,000 copies of Bad 25 in the US but they failed to achieve that goal. It sold 47,000 copies in the first week, according to Wikipedia. I don't have any more numbers for the following weeks, but I guess it hardly went above 100,000 eventually.
Now, like I pointed out in that thread the original Bad album is actually a pretty good seller every year. In 2015 it sold 143,000 copies in the US, being the #23 best selling catalog album of the year. MJ has three more albums that regularly chart (Thriller, Number Ones and Essential) and purely on catalog album sales he sold about 600,000 copies, making him one of the best selling, if not THE best selling, catalog artists.
I further wrote in that thread:
So if the expectation for Bad 25 was selling 200,000 copies and they did not reach that goal and meanwhile they manage to sell 143,000 copies of the original album while doing nothing, investing nothing in it then - from a commercial POV - it's understandable that they will not do anything for OTW. And then this probably means they will do nothing for Dangerous and any of the other albums either. Although I think sometimes they (at least the Estate) should consider other than commercial factors
The general public is still very much interested in MJ's music as his great catalog sales show, but they are interested in the original albums, not demos and stuff like that. That is hard core fan stuff which seems to have much less sales potential than the original albums which do appeal to the general public.