Britney's popularity ensures records will always chart high.

We saw on an earlier post on here that the global and US sales of Britney Spears’ albums have gradually decreased over time from her ...Baby One More Time debut in 1999 to her eighth release, Britney Jean, in November 2013.

100 million sales worldwide make Britney one of the biggest selling artists of all time; competing with and outselling the likes of Guns & Roses, Fleetwood Mac and Rod Stewart; all of whom were releasing charting records more than ten and, in some cases, thirty years before Britney appeared on the music scene.

But do the sales represent the positions her singles & albums peak at in the charts?

If there’s evidence of a slow decline in the number of album sales, both worldwide and in the USA, then surely we’d expect the chart positions of her singles & albums to suffer a similar fate.

Let’s take a look –

Firstly here’s the graph of the worldwide & US sales of her first seven studio albums:

Compare that with the following two graphs:

One thing that immediately stands out between these graphs is that, on average, Britney’s singles appear to have had much more success in the UK than in the USA, whereas Britney’s albums have had better chart success in the USA than in the UK.

In The Zone is currently the second lowest charting of Britney's eight albums in the UK at 13, yet, in the same country, the average chart position of singles from that album is her highest at one. Source

It’s interesting because, with the exception of Britney Jean in the UK and maybe, at a push, In The Zone as well, there’s clear evidence that her albums always peak at extremely high positions in the UK & US charts. Six of Britney’s eight albums have peaked at top spot in the US chart and all have peaked within the top five; also true for five of her albums in the UK.
There is nothing from the falling worldwide & USA sales of Britney's albums that affects their high chart positions, or the average positions of singles released from each album. She is firmly established and this popularity ensures she will always be capable of high-charting records.

Overall, this goes against our expectations that with falling sales figures comes lowly chart positions; Britney may not be selling anywhere near as many records as she did when she first set out almost 15 years ago, but with every single and album release, she still usually manages to find herself lingering around the top positions in the charts.

The role of American album success is a main factor here, but is it also true for the other two female singers Celebrity Shockers have looked at in more detail?

As we saw with Britney, there isn't an album of Miley's so far that has peaked higher in the UK than it did in the USA. Of course being the main star of the American TV show Hannah Montana means the USA has been far more exposed to Miley than the UK, and for a longer period of time, also explaining the high chart positions of the five Hannah Montana soundtrack albums Miley has also done; two peaking at top spot and all five peaking higher in the USA than in the UK.

Some recent shocking antics by Miley has put her popularity in the UK through the roof and this perhaps explains her sudden leap to top spot when her Bangerz album was released in October 2013.

Miley's Bangerz album is her first to peak at top spot in the USA and the UK. Source.

Whitney Houston is one of the few artists to have more overall record sales than Britney, but again there's some resemblance between where their albums have had more success.

Three of Whitney's six studio albums have peaked at number one in the USA, whereas only her second release, Whitney, has managed this feat in the UK. Unlike Britney and Miley though, Whitney has had one album that peaked higher in the UK than it did it the USA: My Love Is Your Love.

It should be pointed out here that for the benefits of the graph layout, Just Whitney... was given a peak of 20. This album in fact only peaked at 76 in the UK but representing this on this graph would make it difficult to clearly distinguish between the chart positions of her other albums so the 20 is just intended to show that this album was actually a lot lower in the charts than her others.

Whitney's 1998 release My Love Is Your Love is her only album to peak higher in the UK than it did in the USA. Source.

So there's evidence that the country you're from plays a key role in your ability to get your records charting high up there, especially in a country as big and as populated as America.

Two of the most successful female artists of recent times, Britney Spears and Whitney Houston, have both found their albums to have more success in the country of their birth, the USA, than in the UK, with only one studio album of their combined 14 to have peaked higher in the UK than it did in the USA: Whitney's My Love Is Your Love.

Miley, on the other hand, may have started off with her albums playing catch-up in the UK to the consistent top positions they'd achieved in the USA, but her latest release, Bangerz, along with some media-gold-dust behaviour, finally gave her her first UK number one album in October 2013.

Success is always difficult to measure but where an artist's album charts is always a good indication of how successful they are and can continue to be. Each album, regardless of how high or low it charts, always gives a platform on which to build, but at the end of the day popularity comes into it and it just depends how shocking a singer/celebrity wants to be if it means they're more popular than they were before. We're not looking in your direction, Miley.