[78-L] Mae Questel, the Betty Boop girl

[Harold Aherne]

Based on the discography in Sudhalter & Evans' Bix bio, Victor certainly kept sales
data on specific titles and to some degree Columbia did too, although I think I've read
that their numbers were actually the number of labels printed...the number of pressings
could be considerably lower.
 
Overall data for Victor and Edison are available at 
http://www.mainspringpress.com/victorsales.html
and
http://www.mainspringpress.com/edison_disc-sales.html
 
Suffice it to say that million sellers were rare prior to the 40s. And when a given title
did sell in vast numbers it was more the result of staying the catalogue for years than
for selling quickly in a few weeks or months as is the case today. Case in point: Jeanette
and Nelson's "Indian Love Call" on Victor. It's often cited as a big seller and indeed it's very
common. But I strongly doubt that the majority of its sales took place in the year of its 
first issue (1936)...the scroll pressing of that title is much harder to find than the Victor
or RCA circular-label version. 
 
-Harold

--- On Wed, 7/29/09, Jan Hovers <janhovers at hotmail.com> wrote:

From: Jan Hovers <janhovers at hotmail.com>
Subject: [78-L] Mae Questel, the Betty Boop girl
To: "78-list" <78-l at 78online.com>
Date: Wednesday, July 29, 2009, 9:00 AM


May I understand that there are no files left from Record Companies with figures how many records they pressed and sold of a certain title? Does this mean that nobody knows exactly by means of sources how unique a certain record is?

(excuse me for my crippled English).

Jan