In that case let me brag about how the girl from the zit commercials went top 40 with her single and G.U.Y. didn't.
Sometimes, as with MDNA and ARTPOP, you have to take more factors than raw numbers into account. MDNA was a flop, and had one #10 single and one more hit that even managed to chart. Outdoing it by just 100k is... regrettable. An unfortunate tragedy. Especially coming off the BTW era.
ARTPOP is the superior album as long as B-Day Song exists though.
Sales are bad now, but not 8x worse than they were in 1989.
Like a Prayer outsold Artpop 8 times over. It also produced four Top 10 hits including a #1 (with massive controversy, press, attention, relevance, #impact, etc) and two #2's.
Seņor Germanotta's career is following the Cyndi Lauper path very very closely, with the same sales (unadjusted for inflation actually, so she is obviously a lot bigger than Cyndi). The Fame/Monster sold the same as She's So Unusual. Born This Way sold the same as True Colours.
Cyndi had one Top 10 hit during A Night to Remember (same as Mr. Germanotta), she sold 2m-ish albums (a bit more than Mr. Germanotta, but in the same range), and had a successful tour (same). It seemed like she was still somewhat relevant and might be able to have a comeback.
And then Hat Full of Stars sold 700k worldwide. Gaga her next album will do these numbers, bookmark me. Bionic was the same too, once a pop star starts going down this path there is nothing to stop the downward momentum, like an avalanche.
