Best Selling Musical Cast Recordings of All Time

These days, you have to factor in digital downloads as well. I imagine that would give some of these numbers quite a significant boost, particularly with Wicked.

I don't believe "the Sound of Music" numbers.

Best selling LP of 1960 has less than 1M?

sound of music 1960 cast album-i agree with you it was #1 on billboard for 16 weeks in 1960...

the sound of music movie soundtrack has estimated 10Million+ sales!!!!!

I figured Book of Mormon must be gold by now- i just cant find any stats to support it

RIAA has started integrating downloads into gold and plat awards but are woefully behind the technology....

Its still stunning to me and not believable that there are only 15 plat or multi plat cast recordings in the history of broadway....there HAVE to be more than that!!!!

Is the My Fair Lady one from Broadway or London?

thanks JKStheatrescene

great addition!

That's strange. I would have thought it was the Original Broadway Cast, though I personally like the London cast better.

Adding original cast recording of Oklahoma

in 1943

read multiple reports of 1million plus sales of original lp. I think it predates riaa

also revising phantom to 13.8 million based of certified copies info of uk us highlights and major country certified copies-I think the 40 m number is marketing and not real....

Will post top sales of movie musical soundtracks friday

what do you think is The number 1 selling movie musical soundtrack Of all time?

Here are some rough costs of producing a cast album:

Most Broadway shows make cast recordings because they are such good marketing tools although few are likely to recover the $400,000 cost a former record company executive said.

Brian Drutman, former vice president of Decca Broadway, said new technology has made the recording process very easy although union rules, which require actors to be paid one week of salary for each day spent recording, keep the cost high.

Still, the price is a “drop in the bucket to a theater producer” who commonly raises about $15 million to put on a Broadway show, said Drutman, whose talk Saturday was part of a Festival of New Musicals at Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam, Conn.

And “without a cast recording, a show dies,” pointed out a member of the audience.

Drutman said a cast recording is considered successful if it sells about 100,000 copies.

WSJ - The Economics of Bway Cast Rexcordings

Updated On: 5/21/15 at 04:08 AM

I think that the MY FAIR LADY London cast was in Stereo, whereas the American cast was Mono. I remember buying the American cast album on 45 RPM then buying the London cast album on LP because it was in Stereophonic Sound.

thanks Tazber, Brian's article was one of the reasons I started this research project and I've communicatd with Brian about it and shared my findings so far.

I did not know about the union rules for paying a weeks salary per day of recording. Is that in exchange for foregoing any royalties from the recording, or do all cast members get royalties from sales?

Do stars and leads get different royalty rates? How much does Idina Menzel for example make from the Wicked CD and download sales?

thats right erindillyfan-you know your stuff!

which makes it even more incredible that it sold over a million copies at initial release....

here's what wikipedia says:

Most of the songs from Oklahoma! were released on a record album by Decca Records in 1943 containing six 10-inch double-sided discs in 78 RPM format. It was the first U.S. cast album featuring the original Broadway cast of a musical. It sold over a million copies, prompting the label to call the cast back into the studio to record three additional selections that had been left out of the first set. These were issued as Oklahoma! Volume Two. In 1949, Decca re-released the first set on LP but not the second set, which soon became a very rare collectors' item. All subsequent LP releases were similarly incomplete. Finally in 2000, Decca Broadway went back to the original glass masters to generate a new high fidelity transfer of the complete song program and released it on CD, utilizing the original 78 album artwork.^[69]

I have both My Fair Lady recordings on CD. The London one is from Masterworks Broadway and the Broadway one is from Sony Classical. They are both remastered. Neither recording is particularly great sounding, however.

It's always funny to me that the two recordings that I consider to have the nicest sound were released right at the dawn of stereo recordings - West Side Story Original Broadway Cast and Candide Original Broadway Cast. (I think Candide might even be mono, but I can't find any info on it).

I'm surprised by how expensive it is to produce a cast recording, considering how many off-Broadway shows get recordings. I wonder if that figure is just for large scale Broadway shows and if smaller shows cost less to record, especially with equity requiring less pay for off-Broadway performers.