First Quad Album to be Gold Seller?

[timbre4]

Okay experts - this is a message received at the QQ Facebook page:

"Question...was Edgar Winter Group They Only Come Out At Night the first quad album to go gold?"

 

[Larry Geller]

Wouldn't it have to be Elvis-Aloha From Hawaii?

 

[JonUrban]

Wouldn't it have to be Elvis-Aloha From Hawaii?

Or The Best of (the) Doors

 

[timbre4]

Or The Best of (the) Doors

That's what I was just going to say!


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[fredblue]

kinda remember something along the lines of steelydave posting an article up at QQ from the Quad era with sales figures and Abraxas being the biggest seller? maybe it's that?

 

[rustyandi]

I don,t know if any Quad LP,s had a Million pressings
But Elvis-Aloha From Hawaii came out as a single release Just Quad
Then as a Stereo pressing
And they are the most Quads on E/Bay
I would think that that it would be the winner?

What about Dark Side of the Moon?

 

[steelydave]

It's kind of a difficult question to answer, I think, and I'm not sure exactly what the question is. Is it asking about:

a) quad-only sales figures for dual-inventory titles?
b) quad-only sales figures including single-inventory quads (Doors, Elvis etc.)
c) combined sales figures for albums that had both quad and stereo releases?
d) by first album do they mean first by date of issue, or first by passing the gold sales post?


If you're including stereo sales figures at all, a lot of the Columbia quads that were part of their initial quad release in January 1972 (Santana, Sly GH, Janis Joplin Pearl etc.) would be in contention too.

As fredblue said I did a post somewhere detailing some quad sales figures for some Columbia titles - they were reported in a couple of issues of Billboard in 1973 and 1975, but I don't think generally speaking quad sales figures were published anywhere. I've even heard it said that one of the (many) reasons for quad's demise was that (in the very pre-Soundscan days) that in terms of units sold quad and stereo sales were just tallied as one unit each, rather than by format. So as a result the labels had no way of knowing precisely how many quad copies they were selling, nor which areas were more 'quad friendly' than others and it just added to their general 'why are we bothering with this' malaise about the format as a whole.

 

[leevitalone1]

The absolute most valuable quad album now is the Elvis live-given free with a tuna promo. Extremely valuable from what I have seen.

 

[leevitalone1]

Wouldn't it have to be Elvis-Aloha From Hawaii?

I have that one-it's the Tuna freebee that's the hot one

 

[timbre4]

I'm not sure the person has a command of English so it may be difficult for them to articulate this question. Thanks for the responses I'm gonna run with this.


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[fredblue]

The absolute most valuable quad album now is the Elvis live-given free with a tuna promo. Extremely valuable from what I have seen.

You can tuna promo but you can't tuna.. fish? :violin

 

[leevitalone1]

You can tuna promo but you can't tuna.. fish? :violin

OK I am the Butt of jokes! It was a free give away with a canned tuna fish promotion. Better?

 

[fredblue]

OK I am the Butt of jokes! It was a free give away with a canned tuna fish promotion. Better?

A fishy tail, erm tale..!

 

[phydo]

If it is combined sales my vote would go to CREEDENCE CLEARWATER REVIVAL GOLD.

Justin

 

[fizzywiggs41]

The Beach Boys-Surf's Up would be my first pick.

but given the time it may have been Wendy Carlos-Switched On Bach.



I suppose it would not have taken a long time to sell 100 quad discs.

 

[JonUrban]

I would wager that NO quad title, on it's own, went gold.

That means that no double-inventory (Quad sold as a separate release) sold enough to go gold on it's own. Heck, aside from some of the early Columbia gold bordered SQ LPs I doubt that any quad LP was printed in quantities over 100,000 pieces at all.

The only real answer to this question would have to be a single-inventory disc, one where there was no stereo copy to buy and EVERYONE ended up with a quad copy. The two most famous single inventory LPs were "Elvis - Aloha From Hawaii" and "The Best of the Doors", both CD-4 Quadradiscs. There were many other RCA titles that were single inventory when they were first released, like "Jimmy Castor Bunch - Dimension III" and "Jose Feliciano - Compartments", but these were not big selling titles at all.

Maybe the question really should be "What was the first album to go gold that was also available on a quad LP or Tape?" Now that is a question that I have no idea of the answer, but it could be anything stated above - like "Creedence Gold" or "They Only Come out at Night".

 

[0tto]

i'm curious if classical qualifies?
an Angel subsidiary of EMI did lots of single inventory releases. perhaps plenty of people purchased them
even without awareness of quadraphonic nature of records and played on ordinary stereo equipment.
there definitely was 100K and more sellers.

 

[steelydave]

Gold records used to be for $1 million in sales, whereas now I think a gold record is 500,000 units shipped. So on that basis, I think it's pretty likely Abraxas went gold ($1m sold) on quad sales alone - as of 08/75 it had sold 131,000 copies (according to that Billboard info I found) which at $6.98 a copy would be $914,380 in sales. Sometime around then (or before?) CBS upped the prices of its quad albums from $6.98 to $7.98 meaning Abraxas would only have had to sell a further 10,700 copies at $7.98 (or a little more if they kept the price at $6.98) between mid-1975 and 1978 when it went out of print.

 

[Larry Geller]

I would wager that NO quad title, on it's own, went gold.

Maybe the question really should be "What was the first album to go gold that was also available on a quad LP or Tape?" Now that is a question that I have no idea of the answer, but it could be anything stated above - like "Creedence Gold" or "They Only Come out at Night".

If this is the criteria, then shouldn't it be South Pacific? Or Victory At Sea?

 

[JonUrban]

If this is the criteria, then shouldn't it be South Pacific? Or Victory At Sea?

Yes. People seem to forget that in the late '50s and early '60, these soundtracks and Broadway play original cast recordings topped the charts for months! That seem hard to fathom these days.