The Billion Dollar Record: What was the highest grossing album of the 1990s?
There’s still a lot of money in the music industry. Monumental amounts, in fact. The myth that there is no cash in creativity these days is one craftily perpetuated by the bigwigs in a manner popularised by used car sales folk of old. The UK music industry, for example, is making a whopping profit—it was worth a record high in 2024, with fans spending £2.4 billion on music.
However, after hefty dividends are extracted by a lucky few, the high figures of today are often spread thin across a large field, competing with increasing inflation. It was a different story in the 1990s, music’s monetary golden age. At the close of the decade, the music industry was bringing in a revenue of around $22.7bn (around $43.7bn in today’s money). In 2023, it was calculated that revenue hit around $28.6bn.
So, while the present times are far from as shabby as is sometimes made out, there has been a drop-off since the ’90s golden peak. Back in those heady days, the commercialism of music was at an all-time high, but streaming and piracy still didn’t exist. So, you had culture marketed to an nth, and the only means for a punter to partake was to buy the CD, snap up the gig ticket, and shell out on the official t-shirt.
With so much money to be made, music marketing went into overdrive. Songs awaited fans on the other end of a premium-rate phone line, ensuring that some tracks made a million before they were even publicly released. Pepsi Points schemes entitled fans to hear unreleased Spice Girls songs provided they had quaffed enough soda. Even Nirvana, who sat swinging on their chair at the back of the class, shaking their head at the tasteless cash-in, were the beneficiaries of an initial $550,000 marketing campaign cleverly disguised as grassroots growth ahead of Nevermind.
What was the highest-grossing album of the 1990s?
Ultimately, the grunge classic boomed to such bolistical heights that David Geffen Company were quickly predicting it would go on to make more than $50m only a matter of weeks after its release. If that’s what anti-commercial music was bringing in, then what about shamelessly mainstream attempts to make something massive? What was a record like that capable of making in the ’90s?
Well, you find your answer in the form of the soundtrack to The Bodyguard. This mega-hit sold around 50 million copies upon release. Given that just about all of these were CD sales, which retailed at around $10-15, that meant it brought in a whopping $500m to $750m from physical sales alone. Since then, it has brought in further profits through streaming, licensing and a small trickle of sales. So, a present estimate for its gross lies somewhere between $800m and the mind-boggling billion mark.
But why has the sales stream been reduced to a trickle? Unlike the likes of Rumours, the success of The Bodyguard was a monumental burst but has proved relatively short-lived thereafter. If anything, this decline evidences the fact that the soundtrack was more of a cultural phenomenon than a completely timeless work of art.
Sure, Whitney Houston is at her peak, delivering a performance that many rank as the greatest pop vocal display of all time, but she only contributes six songs to the record. The rest could be argued to be filler or tracks that work best in the context of the movie, depending on how kind the person you ask is.
How did The Bodyguard soundtrack become a phenomenon?
Well, it was always intended to be a cultural phenomenon. Looking back, the movie, starring Kevin Costner alongside Houston as a sultry action hero in the sleek thriller, was less of a discreet work of art and more of an elaborate marketing campaign for the soundtrack and its powerful lead single, ‘I Will Always Love You’. The song itself was even originally a country hit by Dolly Parton, indicative of the fact that pretty much everything about the whole gambit was calculated in advance.
Around the time of the 1992 release, Houston’s life was lived like an open book by cruel design, the tabloids privy to the various pitfalls she faced. So, when Costner swooped in as the stern, stoic, and shirtless heart throb protecting the vulnerable and flawed megastar played by Houston in the movie, the lines of realism were blurred in a near reality TV manner. This had instant gaudy appeal.
It was sold as a great show of interracial romance and commanded plenty of column inches as a result. And the power of Houston’s self-evident talent rising above the noise pushed the record to an unprecedented position for a soundtrack around the world, while the movie it was tied to served its purpose and then disappeared. It may well have made around $411m from a $30m budget, but it also spent a whopping amount on marketing, eating into the profit. However, even Dolly Parton would most certainly argue that it was worth every pretty penny.
