The football World Cup is currently flooding media from everywhere. No artist is more linked to this competition than Shakira. During each of the last 4 World Cups, she got a huge hit. Whenever, Wherever in 2002, Hips Don’t Lie in 2006, Waka Waka in 2010 and Dare (La La La) in 2014, we are left wondering if her new song Clandestino will take over the same one as these previous summer anthems.
It wasn’t always easy for the Colombia superstar. She started with two anonymous albums, Magia and Peligro, when she was only a teenager. These two records will be ignored in this study as they hardly sold a thing and got removed from the market for decades on the demand of the artist herself. With her 1995’s third album Pies Descalzos Shakira hasn’t only got successful, she became massive, huge enough to cross over boundaries of Latin America. The fourth effort was so strong too that breaking the global audience was inevitable. This unstoppable rise to the top reached its peak with 2001’s set Laundry Service and it’s monster single Whenever, Wherever. Her first worldwide smash, not her last.
Her special nature makes harder to compare her success with the one of remaining pop stars. Shakira continues to release most of her material in Spanish along with English versions. Of course, as popular as she may be in Latin countries, those are still fairly weaker markets than English-speaking ones. So, when taking into account everything, how does she perform against the US / UK icons?
As usual, I’ll be using the Commensurate Sales to Popularity Concept in order to relevantly gauge her results. This concept will not only bring you sales information for all Shakira‘s albums, physical and download singles, as well as audio and video streaming. In fact, it will also determine their true popularity. If you are not yet familiar with the CSPC method, the next page explains it with a short video. I fully recommend watching the video before getting into the sales figures. Of course, if you are a regular visitor feel free to skip the video and get into the figures.
She Wolf was at 480k pure sales in the US according to HDD by the time her last english album came out. This numbers dont do justice to her.
Hi MJD,
Very good work again!
We can see that El Dorado is finally a success album, thanks to the streaming, she succeed her transition! Almost all it’s EAS come from streaming, impressive!
– That Way has ~1M Spotify streams, not 0
– You missed the singles ‘Hay Amores’ and ‘Te Lo Agradezco, Pero No’
Hi Nina!
Not sure why these singles aren’t credited to her on Spotify. This will be fixed, thanks for spotting it!
Hi Nina!
These misses have now been added. Anthony is off for the moment but he will update the Data Collector accordingly soon enough! 🙂
Ok thank you. I’m just itching to see where Elvis comes in all this. I can then rest. Sorry for the impatience! 🙂
I’m really interested to CCR’s CSPC analys.
MJD, I don’t think that some here understand how much work it is to analyze a discography as vast as Presley’s. I don’t think they understand how much work it would to analyze a discography as small as the MC5’s.
Gull durn, she’s good looking.
What happened to Jennifer Lopez and Elvis guys???
Hi Jules!
The schedule remains the one communicated earlier. The Titanic album was a side project to complete the Singles EAS ranking before reaching the 100th artist article, while the one about Shakira was a simple update. The article of Jennifer Lopez is in its latest phases while Anthony and Hernan are digging into Elvis’ discography for about 2 weeks already!
Very interesting. I wonder how Gloria Estefan compares with Shakira. Hope she will be completed in the near future.
I expected Laundry Service and Oral fixation vol 2 to be a bit higher tbh. You should do Gwen Stefani and No doubt next !!!