The soviet numbers are based on shipment codes found on the back of vinyls. With the massive growth of streaming in recent years does the future look bright as IFPI is expecting Russia to be in the top 10 streaming markets by 2030. This didn’t last too long though as the album market fell into total irrelevancy by the early 2010’s. Some local artists were able to sell a few millions during this era as well. Nonetheless the Russian market did come back strong once more closing the 90’s with international stars artists like Madonna and Tarkan selling albums in the hundred thousands.Ī handful of albums went diamond for 200,000 sales by the early to mid 2000’s. This was the start of an issue that would hold back the market for the coming decades. If that wasn’t bad enough legitimate labels were now competing with countless of big and small pirate labels. This resulted in a big drop in album sales as well. The international majors themselves started issuing western releases there as well by the mid 90’s.Īlong with this win for foreign artists, some new challenges came as well.Īfter the Soviet era, the Russian economy saw a big decline during the 90’s. This included bands like Uriah Heep, Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden among others. Since the censorship was gone could these labels release pretty much whatever they wanted to.įor the first time did we see western artist’s full discographies getting released. Many local labels of various legal statuses started to flood the Russian market and filling the Melodiya vacuum quite fast after the USSR dissolved. It means that tracks recorded before this date were free of copyrights in the country. Yet, the Soviet Union signed this convention in 1973 only. In fact, in most countries copyrights are protected by the Universal Copyright Convention (UCC), a convention signed in Geneva in 1952. To release LPs from American and English stars there was still one way for Melodiya which was using a loophole. Of course, it was possible for them to license international albums, but it was rarely done as these would conclude on releases too expensive for the local market. The state arguably approved more music from Italy, France and other parts of Europe than the US and other English speaking countries.Īnother reason for the lack of western releases is that Melodiya wasn’t the copyright owner of these products. There are several reasons for this and censorship is definitely one of them. More often than not did international artists get only one or two albums released, if any at all. Naturally, the only way for foreign acts to sell music there was through Melodiya. A vast majority of these were sold locally. This label was among the world’s largest in terms of volume with 100-200 million records shipped on a yearly basis in the 70’s and 80’s. State owned label Melodiya had a monopoly on all legal music sales from the mid 60’s until the USSR dissolved in 1991. Get ready for some heavy surprises as the USSR market looked like none other. If you go through various online sites covering music sales, you’ll find close to no information at all about the best selling artists in the USSR and Russia.Ī black box up to this day, we digged through the data of this market and identified receipts covering over 100 million unit sales.
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