After two studio albums that didn't find success other than in the underground sphere of American urban music, the Black Eyed Peas added Fergie to their line-up. With her addition, they recorded four more albums, dropping sizable hits such as Where Is The Love?, Shut Up, I Gotta Feeling and Boom Boom Pow.

https://flic.kr/p/dNL3q3

Non-Rock bands rarely sell well outside of their natural habitat, which is the single format. The likes the Beatles and Pink Floyd are unchallenged, and even historical masters like ABBA had relatively low selling studio albums.

So far, we have met three main selling bands from the last 20 years, Coldplay, Linkin Park and Nickelback, all rock-related acts. How do the Black Eyed Peas stack up against those recent giants? Is the popular legend that their success went from non-existent to massive with Fergie’s arrival true? How have albums like Elephunk, Monkey Business or The E.N.D. performed in comparison to Fergie's own The Dutchess?

Original Albums Sales

NB: N/A means no specific number is available. Sales from the country are still accounted for in the Worldwide estimate by using figure patterns of both the artist and the country market. Countries not displayed in this fixed panel are also factored in.

Behind the Front (1998)

Bridging the Gap (2000)

Elephunk (2003)

Monkey Business (2005)

The E.N.D. (2009)

The Beginning (2010)

Original Album Sales - Comments

1998 Behind the Front - 700,000
2000 Bridging the Gap - 700,000
2003 Elephunk - 9,500,000
2005 Monkey Business - 10,300,000
2009 The E.N.D. - 9,050,000
2010 The Beginning - 3,100,000

From well under a million copies a piece to more than 9 million on average!, sales of albums by the Black Eyed Peas truly rocketed with the release of Elephunk. This new found success saw both Behind The Front and Bridging The Gap see their sales increase, with their original sales plateauing around a quarter of a million.

In spite of several notable hits, Elephunk's own sales rose slowly. Suffering from an initial lack of credibility that always damages these kind of acts, this era turned out to be very successful thanks to an impressive string of hits that we will list during the next pages.

Monkey Business and The E.N.D. started with relatively low debuts too considering their predecessor(s) sales. Both also contained a handful of iconic tunes. At 10,3 million and 9,05 million copies respectively, their totals are all the more impressive with the album market collapsing due to the boom of download sales.

The Beginning is disappointing at 3,1 million units, although not as tragic as expected when it debuted at #25 in Italy, #50 in the Netherlands and #58 in Sweden. Obviously, this doesn’t tell the whole story as the group was one of the major forces of the digital market when it started to grow. The following sections will factor in those additional sales to define better the real success of The Beginning.

Physical Singles Sales

As a reminder, the weighting is done with a 10 to 3 ratio between one album and one physical single.

Part 1

Just like singers such as Beyoncé and Justin Timberlake, the American quartet got its first hits on a transitional physical singles market. By 2003, this format was mostly dead in the US with very few songs getting a CD release. In Japan, international acts weren’t issuing singles either. Australia and some European countries were the only ones maintaining relevant sales figures. This didn't last long however, as by the end of the 00s sales had disappeared worldwide.

With this background in mind, hitting half a million units with a unique single is already a great achievement, as is selling several million CD singles in total. The Black Eyed Peas achieved just that. Their top sellers are 2003 smashes Where Is The Love? and Shut Up, two songs combining for 3 million sales.

Behind the Front (1998) - 9,000 equivalent albums

All Singles - 30,000

Bridging the Gap (2000) - 84,000 equivalent albums

Weekends - 20,000
Request + Line - 260,000

Elephunk (2003) - 1,161,000 equivalent albums

Let's Get It Started - 370,000
Hey Mama - 400,000
Shut Up - 1,610,000
Where Is the Love? - 1,490,000

Part 2

By 2005, the Peas were still able to pull singles registering 500,000 sales, as was the case with both Don't Phunk with My Heart and My Humps. Singles from The E.N.D. look like bad performers with under 600,000 sales combined. However, this is down to the physical market's collapse. Indeed, they were outstanding sellers in digital format as we will see...

Monkey Business (2005) - 447,000 equivalent albums

Pump It - 270,000
Don't Phunk with My Heart - 510,000
Don't Lie - 240,000
My Humps - 470,000

The E.N.D. (2009) - 174,000 equivalent albums

Boom Boom Pow - 190,000
Rock That Body - 70,000
Meet Me Halfway - 150,000
I Gotta Feeling - 170,000

The Beginning (2010) - 57,000 equivalent albums

The Time (Dirty Bit) - 120,000
Just Can't Get Enough - 70,000

Orphan - 45,000 equivalent albums

Mas Que Nada - 150,000

Digital Singles Sales

As a reminder, the weighting is done with a 10 to 1,5 ratio between albums and digital singles.

Part 1

Cheap downloads and incredible success weren’t enough to provide the Peas' early songs with good sales. Their first two albums remained mostly unknown all throughout their career. The same can’t be said about Elephunk. Downloads were just getting started at the time, with the vast majority of sales of those 2003 songs happening when they had switched to catalog status. It doesn’t prevent Let’s Get It Started and Where Is the Love? to be on nearly 6 and over 4 million copies sold respectively.

While downloads were already relevant by 2005, they were still only a tiny fraction of what they were going to become by 2009, although ringtones helped considerably. Thus, seeing all Monkey Business singles perform so well in the digital field is outstanding. My Humps was both a download and ringtones monster in the US, moving above 7 million units in total. All together, songs from this album are up nearly 19 million copies sold, a tremendous amount for a 2005 LP.

Behind the Front (1998) - 15,000 equivalent albums

Remaining tracks - 100,000

Bridging the Gap (2000) - 15,000 equivalent albums

Remaining tracks - 100,000

Elephunk (2003) - 1,950,000 equivalent albums

Let's Get It Started - 5,650,000
Hey Mama - 1,200,000
Shut Up - 1,300,000
Where Is the Love? - 4,200,000
Remaining tracks - 650,000

Monkey Business (2005) - 2,828,000 equivalent albums

Pump It - 5,750,000
Don't Phunk with My Heart - 3,300,000
Don't Lie - 1,800,000
My Humps - 7,200,000
Remaining tracks - 800,000

Part 2

It is tough for hit makers to stay on top for many years. The Black Eyed Peas did just that though, with The E.N.D. raising the bar one more time. Boom Boom Pow, I Gotta Feeling and Meet Me Halfway were absolutely unstoppable, blocking anyone else but the Peas from the US Hot 100 #1 spot for an unreal 26 consecutive weeks. The lead single sold over 14 million copies, I Gotta Feeling went on to become one of the highest selling singles of all-time, reaching an unbelievable 17,7 million! Meet Me Halfway, Imma Be and Rock That Body seem almost low sellers in comparison, but their 17 million units sold combined are amazing by themselves. So many purchases of digital products are rewarded with a stunning 8 million equivalent album sales.

Hardly the highest success of the group in pure album format, The Beginning is far from weak on the digital front. Whilst it had less hits than previous albums, both This Time (Dirty Bit) and Just Can’t Get Enough were great sellers at 9,3 million and 6,75 million respectively.

In total, the group moved the impressive total of 100 million downloads and ringtones.

The E.N.D. (2009) - 7,785,000 equivalent albums

Boom Boom Pow - 14,350,000
Rock That Body - 3,750,000
Meet Me Halfway - 7,100,000
Imma Be - 5,800,000
I Gotta Feeling - 17,700,000
Remaining tracks - 3,200,000

The Beginning (2010) - 2,903,000 equivalent albums

The Time (Dirty Bit) - 9,300,000
Don't Stop the Party - 1,500,000
Just Can't Get Enough - 6,750,000
Remaining tracks - 1,800,000

Orphan - 98,000 equivalent albums

Mas Que Nada - 600,000
Remaining tracks - 50,000

Streaming Sales

Streaming is made up of two families - audio and video. Our CSPC methodology now includes both to better reflect the real popularity of each track. The main source of data for each avenue is respectively Spotify and YouTube. As detailed in the Fixing Log article, Spotify represents 132 million of the 212 million users of streaming platforms, while YouTube is pretty much the only video platform generating some revenue for the industry. Below is the equivalence set on the aforementioned article:

Audio Stream - 1500 plays equal 1 album unit
Video Stream - 11,750 views equal 1 album unit

Thus... Equivalent Albums Sales = 212/132 * Spotify streams / 1500 + YouTube views / 11750

Streaming Part 1

As previously mentioned, the later success of the band didn't do wonders for their first two albums. Hardly considered as part of their legitimate discography by some, and with never being newly promoted, their songs remained anonymous. Most of the first album isn’t even available for stream, although it wouldn’t bring much of a difference considering their tiny numbers. Only one song from each topped 1 million at Spotify. This creates the dreadful totals of 2,000 and 4,000 equivalent album sales respectively.

Streaming Part 2

Among songs from Elephunk, a rare situation occurs. For catalog records during the digital era, e.g. pre-2005 albums, the biggest selling songs on the downloads front are virtually the same as the biggest streaming hits. Let’s Get It Started outsold Where Is The Love? but the latter song crushes the former in streams, both audio and video. With more than 500 million streams from Spotify and YouTube combined, the song remains as popular as ever. Remaining singles from that era are undoubtedly lower but still fairly solid. In total the album enjoys 318,000 equivalent album albums sales from streams.

Its follow up, Monkey Business, is fairly similar. Album tracks range from 1 to 5 million Spotify plays while the 4 hit singles are up to 15 million or more. Although lacks a hit as big as Where Is The Love?, both Pump It and My Humps make up for that to bring the record a total of 305,000 equivalent album sales.

Streaming Part 3

33 million Spotify streams plus 153 million YouTube views would make a song one of the biggest streaming tunes of many major artists. Those figures, realized by Imma Be, are only good enough to make it the 5^th biggest song from The E.N.D. album. This perfectly summarizes the amazing strength of this album. Rock That Body is similar to Imma Be while Meet Me Halfway is twice as big. These totals are surpassed by Boom Boom Pow’s 89 million Spotify / 339 million Youtube plays. Head and shoulders above the rest is I Gotta Feeling which rides at 186 million streams on Spotify alone. Expectedly, The E.N.D. is the band’s biggest album on this format at 596,000 equivalent album sales.

The surprise comes from The Beginning. Already a very decent performer in download sales, it’s streams are very solid. Both The Time (Dirty Bit) and Just Can’t Get Enough break 100,000 equivalent album sales on their own. The additional songs push the total of the album to 300,000 units.

Streaming Part 4

Full Length related record Sales

It sounds fairly logical to add together weighted sales of one era - studio album, physical singles, downloads, streams - to get the full picture of an album's popularity. For older releases though, they also generate sales of various live, music videos and compilation albums.

All those packaging-only records do not create value, they exploit the value originating from the parent studio album of each of its tracks instead. Inevitably, when such compilations are issued, this downgrades catalog sales of the original LP. Thus, to perfectly gauge the worth of these releases, we need to re-assign sales proportionally to its contribution of all the compilations which feature its songs. The following table explains this method.

Remaining Long Format

How to understand this table? If you check for example the Renegotiations remix line, those figures mean it sold 100,000 units worldwide. The second statistics column means all versions of all the songs included on this package add for 14,000 equivalent album sales from streams of all types.

The second part on the right of the table shows how many equivalent streams are coming from each original album, plus the share it represents on the overall package. Thus, streaming figures tell us songs from Monkey Business are responsible for 100% of the Renegotiations track list attractiveness. This means it generated all of its 100,000 album sales and so forth for the other records.

Just like all the other artists who rely far more on hits than on dedicated fans, the Black Eyed Peas released very few long format records outside of their studio albums. A couple of low-key sellers add some small sales figures to their original outputs.

BONUS: Total Album (all types) Sales per Country

• America

  • US - 12,935,000
  • Canada - 2,390,000
  • Argentina - 195,000
  • Brazil - 405,000
  • Mexico - 570,000

• Asia - 2,100,000

  • Japan - 1,290,000

• Oceania

  • Australia - 1,390,000
  • New Zealand - 220,000

• Europe - 12,250,000

  • UK - 5,000,000
  • France - 2,465,000
  • Germany - 1,400,000
  • Italy - 520,000
  • Spain - 325,000
  • Sweden - 105,000
  • Netherlands - 225,000
  • Switzerland - 325,000
  • Austria - 115,000
  • Finland - 70,000

• World - 33,450,000

Please note that some of the countries totals may be slightly incomplete when the figure is N/A for minor releases. Countries with too much missing information to be precise enough are listed as N/A.

Black Eyed Peas Career CSPC Results

So, after checking all the figures, how many overall equivalent album sales has each Black Eyed Peas album achieved? Well, at this point we hardly need to add up all of the figures defined in this article!

[xyz-ips snippet="updatedCSPCalbums"]

The linearity of the Peas’ results is atypical. From 2003 to 2009, their success was insanely consistent. All three of Elephunk, Monkey Business and The E.N.D. surpass 13 million equivalent album sales with ease, recording 40 million equivalent album sales together. The E.N.D. reached an amazing 17,6 million. On a less eventful point, their first two albums are incredibly low. Catalog sales alone should have raised their totals far higher. As this didn't happen, it highlights very well the complete absence of adoption of the Fergie-less band by the general public.

The Beginning shows the natural decline in sales of the band that has been ongoing for more than 5 years. This decline is far less dramatic than upon first inspection. Digital formats grant it more sales than its album sales format to compensate partially the sharp drop, in fact its overall 6,4 million sales are fairly solid.

In total, the Black Eyed Peas moved 52,6 million equivalent album sales, almost exclusively on the back of only four albums.

Interestingly, if we factor in The Dutchess era, itself responsible for nearly 12 million equivalent album sales, the Peas end up as one of the top acts of the 00s, challenging even Coldplay and Linkin Park, both of which are over 60 million for that period. Nowadays though, their golden days seem long gone and their solo members are struggling to make it big again. Only time will tell if they will be able to record a successful comeback.

The following sections list their most successful songs as well as their records and achievements.

As usual, feel free to comment and / or ask a question!

Sources: IFPI, Spotify, YouTube, Chartmasters.org.

BIGGEST TRACKS - Black Eyed Peas

The list of most successful songs is compiled in album equivalent sales generated by each of them. It includes the song's own physical singles sales with a 0,3 weighting, its download and streaming sales, and with appropriate weighting too, plus its share among sales of all albums on which it is featured.

1. 2003 - Where Is the Love? [Elephunk] - 6,930,000
2. 2009 - I Gotta Feeling [The E.N.D.] - 6,410,000
3. 2005 - My Humps [Monkey Business] - 4,850,000
4. 2005 - Pump It [Monkey Business] - 4,820,000
5. 2009 - Boom Boom Pow [The E.N.D.] - 4,220,000
6. 2010 - The Time (Dirty Bit) [The Beginning] - 2,730,000
7. 2009 - Meet Me Halfway [The E.N.D.] - 2,660,000
8. 2003 - Let's Get It Started [Elephunk] - 2,530,000
9. 2010 - Just Can't Get Enough [The Beginning] - 2,160,000
10. 2005 - Don't Phunk with My Heart [Monkey Business] - 1,990,000
11. 2003 - Shut Up [Elephunk] - 1,720,000
12. 2009 - Imma Be [The E.N.D.] - 1,660,000
13. 2009 - Rock That Body [The E.N.D.] - 1,400,000
14. 2005 - Don't Lie [Monkey Business] - 1,090,000
15. 2003 - Hey Mama [Elephunk] - 960,000

If you feel inspired by this list, we just created this CSPC Black Eyed Peas playlist on Spotify!

Records & Achievements

• With more than 51 million downloads and ringtones, The E.N.D. is one of the highest selling album eras of all-time in digital format.
• At 8,9 million, I Gotta Feeling is the biggest selling download ever in the US.
• The 26 consecutive weeks at #1 on the Hot 100 achieved by the group, thanks to Boom Boom Pow and I Gotta Feeling, is an all-time record.
• With 5 #1 hit singles in the UK, the Black Eyed Peas are second among American groups or duets for the record number of UK chart toppers. Behind only Blondie's tally of 6.
• Elephunk, Monkey Business and The E.N.D. all surpassed 3 million European sales, making the Black Eyed Peas the only American group or duet to ever achieve this feat.

We have more for you...

... Fergie's full CSPC analysis

... will.i.am's full CSPC analysis

... checking out the upcoming artists or even voting for them!

... similar artists

... best-selling artists, albums, and singles