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Billie Eilish is such a household name since 2019 that it is hard to believe she is still only 20.
No matter how hyped they are, can artists really belong to the top sellers at this age and with a tiny discography?
[expand title="Get to know Billie Eilish" trigclass="noarrow"]
Billie Eilish, real name Billie Eilish Pirate Baird O'Connell, is an American singer born, and raised, in Los Angeles on December 18, 2001.
Homeschooled, Billie Eilish and her older brother FINNEAS, who's her producer, digged into creative projects from a very young age.
She wrote the song Fingers Crossed at 11. It became her first upload on SoundCloud in September 2015, when she was 13. Ocean Eyes, one of her most popular hits, was then released a pair of months later.
Technically speaking, Billie Eilish issued only two album, 2019's When We All Fall Asleep, Where Doo We Go? and 2021's Happier Than Ever.
She issued various songs through her SoundCloud from 2015 though, most of which were assembled into the EP Don't Smile at Me. Several additions led this EP to ultimately home 11 songs.
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In 2019, it was impossible to miss bad guy. The song even ended up as IFPI's biggest global single of the year.
She has hardly been dominating singles chart though. Therefore I Am, a #2 US hit, is her only remaining top 5 hit besides the aforementioned bad guy.
How has she been able to amass billions of streams with only 1 significant smash? We will review her discography in order to answer this question.
Another unknown refers to her pure albums and singles sales. With official figures mixing pure sales and streaming conversions these days, her real numbers are a mystery. We will fix this situation.
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 Billie Eilish's albums, physical and download singles, as well as audio and video streaming, but 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.
The Commensurate Sales to Popularity Concept (CSPC)
There are two ways to understand this revolutionary concept. The first is the Scribe video posted below. If you are unaware of the CSPC method, you will get the full idea within just a few minutes.
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If you are a mathematical person, and want to know the full method as well as formulas, you can read the full introduction article.
Now let's get into the artist's sales figures in detail in order to apply this concept and define the act's true popularity!
Billie Eilish Albums Sales
Original Album Sales - Comments
In a streaming world, sales figures are very low. They are even lower when you haven't been around for long enough to convert fans into collectors when physical records were still a thing.
When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? became an instant classic though. It is now as mandatory for collectors to pick it up along with 60s biggest albums' reissues.
As an illustration of this fact, it was the 2nd best selling album in vinyl format in 2019 in the US. It was the only LP inside the Top 10 that doesn't feature music recorded in 1983 or earlier.
It reproduced this annual ranking in 2020, with 2017's Don't Smile at Me shockingly making the top 10 too, at #8, sandwitched between Fleetwood Mac's Rumours and Michael Jackson's Thriller.
Happier Than Ever was 5th for the year, with sales that would have granted it the #1 spot a year earlier.
All these chart feats shot the albums to great pure sales overall for our day and age. They also continue to sell well week after week.
Don't Smile at Me continuous to enjoy an impressive catalog appeal 5 years after its first release, pushing its to date total to just over one million copies.
When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?'s tally is up to 2.34 million. Pure sales wise, it's the best selling American album since Taylor Swift's Reputation from 2017.
Billie Eilish released next to no additional record, firstly an Apple Music EP titled Up Next Session with an estimated 2,500 sales, and then the Live at Third Man Records. A Record Store Day exclusive, it has now got 3 runs of limited units up to 2020's RSD, adding for 18,470 copies.
In recent weeks, a 2-CD box pairing together When... and Happier... came out in France, moving just over 1,000 copies to date.
Billie Eilish Songs Sales
Physical Singles Sales
As a reminder, the weighting is done with a 10 to 3 ratio between one album and one physical single.
Obviously, these numbers aren't representative of the popularity of the songs.
Up to date, 7 singles from Billie Eilish got physical versions. All of them were limited LP or cassette releases, except No Time To Die which had CD versions to satisfy James Bond's collectors.
There aren't much more to tell about this format except that the artist is poised to continue dropping these kind of releases considering her success there.
Digital Songs
As a reminder, the weighting is done with a 10 to 1,5 ratio between one album and one digital single.
Downloads and ringtones are now just another dying formats.
Even the biggest global hit of the year can only sell 1.68 million copies, in fact these are the sale of bad guy itself.
In recent years, there have been two wildcards for digital sales, South Korea and China.
South Korean post-2017 sales are excluded since they aren't traditional sales anymore. Chinese sales are still restricted to specific releases. No Billie Eilish song came out in paid-for format there.
With this in mind, to hit 150,000 sales or more is already great these days, let alone 1.5 million.
Strong ongoing sales for many months brought songs like Ocean Eyes, Lovely, When the Party's Over and Bury a Friend close or over half a million sales each.
They were at first #84, #64, #29 and #14 hits in the US, respectively, which highlights their lasting appeal.
Everything I Wanted also seemed to leave the highest section of charts fast, but then remained lower down for very long. At 550,000 units, it's now the singer's runner up in terms of downloads.
It's precisely this long lasting appeal of many of her tracks that pushes her career to date to 7.3 million downloads in spite of making no big waves with most songs.
Streaming
Streaming is made up of audio and video streams. Our CSPC methodology includes both to better reflect the real popularity of each track. The main source of data for each avenue is respectively Spotify and YouTube.
To factor in the growing impact of multiple Asian countries where these platforms aren't always the go-to site for music streaming, more sources have been added.
In order to account for their real popularity in each relevant country, the below sources have been used along with the mentioned ratios that reflect the market share of each area.
Audio Streams
– South Korea: Genie streams * 2.20 (consistent with Gaon streaming numbers)
– Japan: AWA streams * 68 / 4 (AWA has 4% of the Japanese streaming market, and 32% are already considered through Spotify’s extrapolation)
– Arabic world: Anghami streams
– Sub-Saharan Africa: Boomplay + Audiomack streams
– Elsewhere: Spotify streams * 649 / 406 (649 million subscribers of global platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, YouTube Music, Deezer, etc. against 406 million from Spotify itself) + Genie streams * 2.20 (uses Genie rather than Spotify to extrapolate markets like Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam)
Video Streams
– China* : QQ video streams * 50 if the song is available for audio stream, QQ video streams * 5 elseway (scale built based on known figures for several major artists)
– Elsewhere : Youtube views increased by 10% to account for various local platforms
*since Chinese streaming platforms are mostly video streaming platforms, their streams are weighted on par with YouTube streams.
Audio Stream value – 1,500 plays equal 1 album unit
Video Stream value – 6,750 views equal 1 album unit
Equivalent Albums Sales (EAS) = ( Spotify * 649/406 + Genie * 2.20 * 2 + AWA * 68 / 4 + Anghami + Boomplay + Audiomack ) / 1500 + ( QQ views* 50(or 5) + YouTube * 1.1 ) / 6750
Top Hits
What can we say? All these numbers are mind-blowing.
Naturally, the leader is bad guy with 2.4 billion streams on Spotify, nearly as much on YouTube and massive numbers in Asian platforms.
It all adds up to 3.38 million EAS. This is more than the pure sales of the album.
Lovely is a stunning runner up. The song never went higher than #24 on Spotify global weekly chart, yet it cumulates over 1.85 billion streams.
It continues to do wonders up to now as it is charted #110 on its 221st week inside the top 200.
At 1.67 million EAS is When the Party's Over, with once again healthy 10-digits numbers on both Spotify and YouTube.
Ocean Eyes, the track uploaded online by the singer when she was 13, is next.
It is one more song which gets better with time as the track is over 1.28 billion streams on Spotify... without ever making the Top 100 weekly chart.
Everything I Wanted is also a billionaire on Spotify at this point, while Happier Than Ever will soon get there.
The latter, easily the biggest song from its parent album, is also over a million EAS from streams. In this situation are also Bury a Friend, Idontwannabeyouanymore and Bellyache.
The most amazing result on this table remains the insane consistency over Billie Eilish's discography.
Out of her 47 lead songs, 43 are at 88 million streams on Spotify or more. Her weakest tune is Not My Responsibility, at 45 million, the only remaining song below the 50 million mark.
At this point, with nothing released for quite some time, she continues to gain 13 million streams every day, an average of 300,000 per track from her catalog.
Happier Than Ever was streamed 1.16 million times yesterday, so even her biggest track of the moment represents only 9% of her total streams.
These widespread heavy streams conclude on massive numbers for her albums.
Songs from When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? add for 11.4 million EAS, Don't Smile at Me is very strong too at 9.0 million, while Happier Than Ever at 4.0 million has a large deficit, but it's still a very solid number in absolute terms.
Full catalog breakdown
If you are familiar with the artist's catalog and want to check details of each and every song, you can access to all of them right here.
Keep yourself up to date
Our website provides you a fantastic tool which fetches updated Spotify streams as you request them, use it to watch these results grow day after day!
Billie Eilish Career CSPC Results
So, after checking all the figures, how many overall equivalent album sales has each album by Billie Eilish achieved? Well, at this point we hardly need to add up all the figures defined in this article!
[xyz-ips snippet="updatedCSPCalbums"]
With total sales still fairly low at the start of 2019, Billie Eilish keeps rising and rising every month.
Don't Smile at Me is now over 10.38 million units. The only way is up, and considering how well songs like Lovely and Ocean Eyes are still doing, expect it to climb even higher among 2017's top albums, where it already made the top 5.
Then there is When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? at 14.31 million. It has moved ahead of Post Malone's Hollywood Bleeding as the biggest album from 2019.
Happier Than Ever hasn't done as well as its predecessors, but near 5 million is obviously nothing to be ashamed of.
While singles failed to smash charts, it appears the record has legs both on sales and streaming charts, so it will also build a very interesting total.
Songs like Everything I Wanted and No Time To Die greatly contribute to the orphan folder which is closing in 4 million sales.
When we last updated the singer's statistics in 2020, we mentioned that she was the artist with the fastest growth.
Two years later, only Indian superstar Arijit Singh can outdo her, which is very telling considering as new Indian users are led to pick their favorite singers when creating their account, which helps their artists to grow a lot on this chart.
Career-wise, Billie Eilish is up to 33,473,000 equivalent album sales. Not bad for a 20 years old singer.
Singles CSPC results
The list is compiled in album equivalent sales generated by each song. Therefore, these figures are not merged units of singles formats.
Instead, it includes weighted sales of the song's physical single, download, ringtone and streaming as well as its share among sales of all albums on which it is featured.
1. 2019 - Billie Eilish - Bad Guy [When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?] - 4,330,000
2. 2018 - Billie Eilish & Khalid - Lovely [Don't Smile at Me] - 2,780,000
3. 2018 - Billie Eilish - When the Party's Over [When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?] - 2,090,000
4. 2015 - Billie Eilish - Ocean Eyes [Don't Smile at Me] - 1,780,000
5. 2019 - Billie Eilish - Everything I Wanted [Orphan] - 1,420,000
6. 2021 - Billie Eilish - Happier Than Ever [Happier Than Ever] - 1,380,000
7. 2019 - Billie Eilish - Bury a Friend [When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?] - 1,380,000
8. 2017 - Billie Eilish - Idontwannabeyouanymore [Don't Smile at Me] - 1,250,000
9. 2017 - Billie Eilish - Bellyache [Don't Smile at Me] - 1,180,000
10. 2018 - Billie Eilish - You Should See Me in a Crown [When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?] - 1,070,000
If you feel inspired by this list, we just created this CSPC Billie Eilish playlist on Spotify!
Discography results
Thanks to the ASR (Artist Success Rating) concept, we know that her sales represent 14.78 million times the purchase of her entire discography. Coupled with the total sales, it translates into an ASR score of 126.
The ranking of all artists studied so far is available too at this link.
Records & Achievements
- At 14,305,000 EAS, When We Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? is the most successful album from 2019.
- At 10,379,000 EAS, Don't Smile at Me is among the 5 most successful albums from 2017.
- At 4,942,000 EAS, Happier Than Ever is among the 10 most successful albums from 2021.
- In 2020, Billie Eilish became the first artist since 1981 and the youngest ever to collect all 4 main Grammy Awards the same year.
- At over 400,000 units, When We Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? is the highest selling vinyl of new recordings in the US since 2000.
- At 2.42 billion on Spotify, bad guy is the 2nd most streamed female song ever.
- At 93.38 million on Genie, bad guy is the 3rd most streamed international song ever on South Korean platform.
- At 1.86 billion on Spotify, Lovely is the most streamed song ever by an artist aged 18 or less.
- At 1.86 billion on Spotify, Lovely is the most streamed song ever with a weekly chart peak below the Top 20.
- At 1.28 billion on Spotify, Ocean Eyes is the most streamed song ever by an artist aged 15 or less.
- At 1.28 billion on Spotify, Ocean Eyes is the most streamed 2010s song with a weekly chart peak below the Top 100.
NB : EAS means Equivalent Album Sales
Dynamic Spotify Key Performance Indicators
As usual, feel free to comment and / or ask a question!
Sources: IFPI, Spotify, YouTube, Discogs.
You may be interested in...
... Billie Eilish' streaming masters analysis
... best-selling artists, albums, and singles
We have created amazing cross-artists tops. Click to see all CSPC and raw sales results compiled so far!
... similar artists
To put figures into perspective, click to reach career breakdowns of pop star divas:
Hi there, IFPI had When We All Fall Asleep at 1.2M pure sales/shipments on their 2019 Global Report and I find it really hard to believe it sold 500K copies pure in 2020 alone. Can you explain the breakdown? Thank you
Hi, thanks for the update I have been waiting for 1 year, but I am confused about streaming figures. In this article, I saw Spotify and YouTube figures only , I mean Billie is very huge in Apple Music and Amazon Music, esp her debut album. Are these streaming platforms streams taken into account in the CSPS result? Thanks for your answer beforehand
Hi, why did you stop putting the cover photo with the graphics as before since The Police? It was much better
hi! I do have a question for you if you don't mind. Wouldn't airplay also count for an artist's total? Why does stream count but airplay does not? and don't say it is because people can chose what to listen to on streaming because we all know that Spotify's playlists can be as manipulated as those from radios. And, just like payola, streaming can be inflated by companies (ej Beyoncé being investigated for Tildal)
Update Celine dion pls. Encore un soir sales aren't updated and she already released a new album.
The artists who get high airplay will get higher sales do to the exposure. So the sales formats used here do actually reflect airplay without mentioning it specifically.
People choosing to buy/stream music is a more valuable measurement of overall sales and success than abstract airplay audience numbers.
Yes what a great start for a young artists. If she keeps this up, these first couple of albums will probably double their current CSPC numbers.
Read the introduction to the article. Spotify and YouTube actually release their numbers so those are used to estimate the numbers from other steaming platforms using market share ratios.
For me, airplay is redundant because there is absolutely no consumer choice involved whatsoever, with regards to which artists or tracks can be listened to, you are 100% at the mercy of whatever a station wants to play. Obviously some streaming playlists do work on a similar level but with streaming, at least you do have the ability to select which artist, artist playlist or track you want.
yay! Its January 2020 now and WWAFA,WDWG? has been confirmed by MediaTraffic for selling 7,150,000 copies around the world! And i think by now, Dont Smile At Me EP has sold around 1.5 million copies 😀
By the end of 2019, When We All Fall Asleep sold around 4.490 million and was confirmed by MediaTraffic
