On April 30th of this year, the Ramones debut album, Ramones, achieved Gold certification for sales of more than 500,000 copies. The album was released nearly 40 years ago, in 1976.
Just one other Ramones album, a compilation called Ramones Mania, has reached that mark. That was in 1988.
The Ramones never had a Platinum album (sales more than 1,000,000) during their career. They have more than 20 million Spotify streams.
“The Ramones have one gold record to their name. But they meant nothing. They never succeeded, failed, in fact.”
Gene Simmons, 1988.
Why are you bringing up the streams? 20mill Spotify streams is the euqivalent of selling 20K albums (in value)
IT’S ALL BECAUSE OF STREAMING THAT NOBODY BUYS RECORDS ANYMOREZ
There is an obvious answer for them not having a platinum album. I’ll let someone else state it.
Let me guess, home cassette recording destroyed their chances of ever actually selling gold or platinum sooner?
I’m sure there are a handful of reasons, but the way I understand it is that the first record wasn’t initially released on CD. It was released as a compilation called “All the stuff and more, Volume 1”, along with their second record. Since the songs were so short, it was a 1 cd release, so initially fans either didn’t know they had to buy the compilation, or if they bought the compilation, they got 2 albums, but it only counted as 1 sale, & none of those sales officially counted towards the sales totals of either album.
This may have been an effort to release a bargain product because their fans weren’t consumer-types to begin with. But then you have the merch sales…
Either way, the statistics don’t really reflect the Ramones’ impact on music.
While groundbreaking, they just weren’t that good from the standpoint of mainstream retail.
The reason they never sold is they weren’t commercial, just hugely consequential musically. The mainstream music business had no idea what to do with them, didn’t play them on radio (the main way for kids to learn about bands), and never warmed to their blistering critique of bloated rock acts like the that laughable musical pabulum, the clown car known as Kiss. But Kiss was passe’ musically the day The Ramones album came out, and Simmons knows it, and resents it. I don’t care how many tickets to lamebrains Simmons can sell for his booze cruises, but as far as music is concerned, The Ramones buried Kiss and they have never gotten out.
The streams tell the tale. The Ramones are still relevant and appreciated. Kiss is just a Vegas act.
Because they suck. The most over-rated band in history
your a fing moron! go listen to miley cyrus!
Guys, those streaming plays are definitely the reason they never sold 1M records between their active years of 1974 to what, 1996 or something? Everyone held out knowing they could listen for free 15 years later.
Thought I was the only one…btw just started listening to this guy Jimi Hendrix on Spotify…worth checking out if you’re bored.
simply too faf ahead of thier time!!
The Ramones one of the greatest most original bands
of all time! the radio and music jerk offs are the reason
they never had hits even though they wrote 1,0oo
hits! Joey was one of the greatest singers since Elvis!
nobody can match him! Johnny was a very unusual
guitarist because he was limited but he played like
nobody else and Tommy invented a drumming style
that everybody has stolen from and Dee Dee was a
great song writer! if he had wrote some of these
songs in the rockabillly era he’d be famous and rich!
too bad they never got record sales but they got a
cult following and toured their entire lives and made
fools out of the big shot industry morons! they are
rock n roll legends! and never be another!