ARTPOP's sales were not that bad.

[StrawberryBlond 13,303]

Album sales as a whole have been taking a bashing, Gaga is just one of many victims of it. If you look at her discography, Rihanna's albums sell about 3 million worldwide per release (she obviously sold more for certain ones), to a total of 30 million albums worldwide. That figure is spread across 7 albums. Gaga's sold around 25 million albums (though some say it's higher) over 4 albums (if you count TFM as an album). So, she's not flopping on that front at all. She's pulling in just slightly less/equivalent sales of the average Rihanna album, and that's without the mega hit singles that Rihanna has preceding her albums. As for the tour, with any luck, once the remaining sales have been calculated, she'll have made $77 million or more by the end. That is the average gross for a major pop tour in this day and age, or indeed any time. If you look at the list of biggest tours, there's barely any pop there, it's all mostly rock acts. Pop shows have never had $200 million+ demand, apart from Madonna and MJ. Mostly because pop shows are famous for lipsynching, bad vocals and no live instrumentation. So, pulling in this amount for the tour, while under-performing by Gaga's standards, is a solid figure for a pop show. Britney's last tour had the same amount of dates and pulled in $67 million and until recently, Rihanna had never come close to the $100 million mark in touring. Beyonce had never been that big a touring force until recently either. And let's not even get started on Katy's California Dream tour earnings. There are artists who've had more successful albums than ARTPOP who didn't yield a tour so successful. In fact, very few artists (and their labels) wouldn't have the guts to tour with an album that had performed to ARTPOP standards, deeming it to be too risky. Madonna, Mariah, Britney, Rihanna have skipped touring with lower selling albums before and Kelly Clarkson and Christina Aguilera have cancelled tours, but Gaga has yet to do either of those things.

 

ARTPOP was doomed to under-perform before it had even been released: the media and the public (and not forgetting Katy's out of the blue single and album announcements) had an agenda and did everything in their power to convince themselves and everyone else that she was over and that is no basis for a highly successful album. The exact same thing happened to Christina with Bionic, albeit to a more extreme degree of which there was no going back. C2C is revitalising Gaga's career now and she's turning a corner, so here's hoping we don't have to endure such a negative anti campaign with the next album and she'll be more likely to succeed.