The truth about Britney Spears’ album sales in Europe
SOUTHERN EUROPE – SPAIN
During the introduction, I mentioned Spain as a country where teen pop music was big. Given this fact, it is hard to qualify results of Britney‘s first albums. From a general point of view, selling upwards of 300,000 units with a foreign album is extraordinary in Spain. The remaining artists with 20 million plus sellers worldwide post-2000 are Adele, Linkin Park, Eminem and Norah Jones, none of them ever sold 300,000 copies with a single album in Spain, which shows the huge achievement it represents. The remaining huge teen pop acts like the Spice Girls or the Backstreet Boys registered albums selling from 800,000 units to 1 million plus there.
This teen pop flag explains the drop in sales album after album of Britney in this country. In The Zone sales are very telling, while that album was some kind of a rebound popularity-wise for Britney, the more mature sound was in opposition to the reasons of her stardom in Spain.
As for estimations, the only figure outside of the correct interval is Greatest Hits‘ figure. The album had relatively low initial sales, in spite of debuting at #8, with the record failing to be in the end of the year Top 50. Decent catalog sales are always harder to estimate due to the large share of them which happens off the radar.
Merging all the data together concludes on the following album sales to date:
- Baby One More Time – 350,000
- Oops!… I did It Again – 250,000
- Britney – 150,000
- In The Zone – 75,000
- Greatest Hits, My Prerogative – 45,000
- Blackout – 10,000
- Circus – 15,000
- The Singles Collection – 5,000