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Initially more widely known for being Julio Iglesias' son, Enrique Iglesias has earned a big place in the history of Latin music, with a massive success from the very beginning and a great appeal outside of the Hispanic world, not just in the USA but in most of Europe, Australia, India and occasionally other places like Japan.
He has accumulated a nice string of hits, including several cleverly-chosen collaboration with fellow artists, notably Whitney Houston, Juan Luis Guerra, Lil Wayne, Ciara and a big list of current Latin acts who helped him remain relevant and somehow contemporary in recent years.
While he doesn't rank amongst the absolute biggest selling acts of all time, compared to other acts that have been covered, it is important to note that for being Spanish, with most of its discography sung in that language, the results may surprise some people.
An interesting aspect is the impact of streaming for a Spanish-language artist. Will it downgrade or improve their share among the World music industry? In the past, the very top selling Spanish albums were limited to 5-6 million copies sold worldwide, about five times less than the equivalent success on a global scale. We will be able to check how this ratio is evolving now that streaming is everywhere.
Enrique Iglesias (1995)
- America
- US – 1,800,000
- Canada – N/A
- Brazil - 200,000
- Mexico - 250,000
- Argentina – 175,000
- Asia
- Japan – N/A
- Oceania
- Australia – N/A
- New Zealand – N/A
- Europe –
- UK – N/A
- France – N/A
- Germany – N/A
- Italy – N/A
- Spain – 450,000
- Sweden – N/A
- Netherland – 10,000
- Switzerland – N/A
- Austria – N/A
- Finland – N/A
- World – 4,100,000
Vivir (1997)
- America
- US – 1,500,000
- Canada – N/A
- Brazil - 275,000
- Mexico - 500,000
- Argentina – 330,000
- Asia
- Japan – N/A
- Oceania
- Australia – N/A
- New Zealand – N/A
- Europe – 380,000
- UK – N/A
- France – N/A
- Germany – N/A
- Italy – N/A
- Spain – 250,000
- Sweden – N/A
- Netherland – 5,000
- Switzerland – N/A
- Austria – N/A
- Finland – N/A
- World – 4,400,000
Cosas DeL AMOR (1998)
- America
- US – 1,000,000
- Canada – N/A
- Brazil - 125,000
- Mexico - 250,000
- Argentina – 90,000
- Asia
- Japan – N/A
- Oceania
- Australia – N/A
- New Zealand – N/A
- Europe – 420,000
- UK – N/A
- France – 25,000
- Germany – N/A
- Italy – 50,000
- Spain – 150,000
- Sweden – 20,000
- Netherland – 10,000
- Switzerland – 20,000
- Austria – N/A
- Finland – N/A
- World – 2,600,000
Enrique (1999)
- America
- US – 2,250,000
- Canada – 525,000
- Brazil - 100,000
- Mexico - 100,000
- Argentina – 120,000
- Asia
- Japan – 100,000
- Oceania
- Australia – 110,000
- New Zealand – 35,000
- Europe – 2,210,000
- UK – 200,000
- France – 120,000
- Germany – 425,000
- Italy – 125,000
- Spain – 475,000
- Sweden – 60,000
- Netherland – 80,000
- Switzerland – 100,000
- Austria – 35,000
- Finland – 10,000
- World – 6,700,000
Escape (2001)
- America
- US – 3,800,000
- Canada – 550,000
- Brazil - 100,000
- Mexico - 200,000
- Argentina – 40,000
- Asia
- Japan – 100,000
- Oceania
- Australia – 385,000
- New Zealand – 25,000
- Europe – 2,990,000
- UK – 1,550,000
- France – 75,000
- Germany – 425,000
- Italy – 60,000
- Spain – 180,000
- Sweden – 40,000
- Netherland – 135,000
- Switzerland – 90,000
- Austria – 45,000
- Finland – N/A
- World – 9,100,000
Quizás (2002)
- America
- US – 600,000
- Canada – 25,000
- Brazil - 10,000
- Mexico - 100,000
- Argentina – 20,000
- Asia
- Japan – N/A
- Oceania
- Australia – N/A
- New Zealand – N/A
- Europe – 280,000
- UK – 10,000
- France – N/A
- Germany – N/A
- Italy – N/A
- Spain – 125,000
- Sweden – 5,000
- Netherland – N/A
- Switzerland – 10,000
- Austria – N/A
- Finland – N/A
- World – 1,200,000
7 (2003)
- America
- US – 4500,000
- Canada – 100,000
- Brazil - 15,000
- Mexico - 50,000
- Argentina – 20,000
- Asia
- Japan – 10,000
- Oceania
- Australia – 90,000
- New Zealand – N/A
- Europe – 570,000
- UK – 300,000
- France – 15,000
- Germany – 70,000
- Italy – 10,000
- Spain – 20,000
- Sweden – 5,000
- Netherland – 20,000
- Switzerland – 25,000
- Austria – 5,000
- Finland – 5,000
- World – 1,500,000
Insomniac (2007)
- America
- US – 275,000
- Canada – 35,000
- Brazil - 10,000
- Mexico - 50,000
- Argentina – 40,000
- Asia
- Japan – N/A
- Oceania
- Australia – 10,000
- New Zealand – N/A
- Europe – 790,000
- UK – 300,000
- France – 65,000
- Germany – 50,000
- Italy – 20,000
- Spain – 15,000
- Sweden – 15,000
- Netherland – 60,000
- Switzerland – 25,000
- Austria – 10,000
- Finland – 10,000
- World – 1,450,000
Euphoria (2010)
- America
- US – 425,000
- Canada – 50,000
- Brazil - 10,000
- Mexico - 120,000
- Argentina – 40,000
- Asia
- Japan – N/A
- Oceania
- Australia – 65,000
- New Zealand – N/A
- Europe – 370,000
- UK – 120,000
- France – 60,000
- Germany – 20,000
- Italy – 10,000
- Spain – 35,000
- Sweden – N/A
- Netherland – 15,000
- Switzerland – 10,000
- Austria – 10,000
- Finland – 5,000
- World – 1,350,000
Sex And Love (2014)
- America
- US – 275,000
- Canada – 40,000
- Brazil - 25,000
- Mexico - 480,000
- Argentina – 40,000
- Asia
- Japan – N/A
- Oceania
- Australia – 10,000
- New Zealand – N/A
- Europe – 290,000
- UK – 45,000
- France – 15,000
- Germany – 25,000
- Italy – 25,000
- Spain – 75,000
- Sweden – N/A
- Netherland – 15,000
- Switzerland – 10,000
- Austria – 10,000
- Finland – N/A
- World – 1,500,000
Original Album Sales – Comments
1995 Enrique Iglesias – 4,100,000
1997 Vivir – 4,400,000
1998 Cosas Del Amor – 2,600,000
1999 Enrique – 6,700,000
2001 Escape – 9,100,000
2002 Quizás – 1,200,000
2003 7 – 1,500,000
2007 Insomniac – 1,450,000
2010 Euphoria – 1,350,000
2014 Sex And Love – 1,500,000
With some 33,9 million albums sold, Enrique Iglesias can claim one of the strongest sales total by any Latin act. His sales in Latin countries - not just Hispanic countries, like Spain and the majority of Latin America, but also Brazil and Portugal, a bit less Italy and France - are outstanding. Whilst his peak days are gone since more than a decade, in recent years he has kind of reinvented himself with several high profile collaborations and huge reggaeton influences which, altogether, took his music to newer generations.
In the rest of the world, his English speaking stuff has generally done very well, especially at the time of Enrique and, most notably, Escape, his biggest album in terms of pure sales with 9,1 million sold and a strong global appeal.
USA has brought massive success to his English albums but, considering the strong Spanish community there, his early album have also been able to rack up great numbers, although largely downgraded by Soundscan which wasn't scanning specialized Latin retailers at the time.
Overall, he accumulates 21 years of great and consistent success. A success, of course, not limited to the album format. Let's now see what else he achieved through other formats!
Physical Singles Sales
Enrique Iglesias doesn't really belong to the boom era in physical singles sales total. By the time he started his career and made it big across the world, singles sales were no longer a relevant format.
Considering all that, his almost 10 million sold works out to be quite a huge amount, once everything is considered.
As a reminder, the weighting is done with a 10 to 3 ratio between one album and one physical single.
Enrique Iglesias (1995) - 60,000 equivalent albums
Si Tú Te Vas
Experiencia Religiosa
Other singles from Enrique Iglesias (album)
=200,000
Vivir (1997) - 60,000 equivalent albums
Enamorado Por Primera Vez
Other singles from Vivir
=200,000
Cosas Del amor (1998) - 30,000 equivalent albums
Esperanza
Nunca Te Olvidaré
=100,000
Enrique (1999) - 1,050,000 equivalent albums
Bailamos - 1,750,000
Be With You - 700,000
Could I Have This Kiss Forever - 1,000,000
Sad Eyes - 50,000
Escape (2001) - 930,000 equivalent albums
Hero - 2,000,000
Escape - 800,000
Don't Turn Of The Lights - 100,000
Other singles - 200,000
Quizás (2002) - 75,000 equivalent albums
Mentiroso
Quizás
Para Qué La Vida
=250,000
7 (2003) - 180,000 equivalent albums
Addicted - 200,000
Not In Love - 400,000
Insomniac (2007) - 165,000 equivalent albums
Do You Know - 150,000
Tired Og Being Sorry - 400,000
Euphoria (2010) - 30,000 equivalent albums
Total singles - 100,000
Sex And Love (2014) - 0 equivalent albums
Total singles - 0 (no physical singles released)
Orphan Album - 90,000 equivalent albums
Takin' Back My Love - 100,000
Other physical singles - 200,000
Digital Singles Sales
Ever since digital downloads became one of the most dominant formats -now on decline -, Enrique Iglesias have reached around 49 million units sold worldwide, an impressive amount. His albums Euphoria and Sex And Love managed a huge string of consecutive big selling download tracks.
As a reminder, the weighting is done with a 10 to 1,5 ratio between one album and one digital single.
Enrique Iglesias (1995) - 225,000 equivalent albums
Total tracks sales – 1,500,000
Vivir (1997) - 75,000 equivalent albums
Total tracks sales – 500,000
Cosas Del amor (1998) - 75,000 equivalent albums
Total tracks sales – 500,000
Enrique (1999) - 345,000 equivalent albums
Bailamos – 1,000,000
Be With You – 600,000
Could I Have This Kiss Forever - 200,000
Other tracks - 500,000
Escape (2001) - 818,000 equivalent albums
Hero – 3,500,000
Scape – 1,250,000
Don't Turn Off The Lights and other tracks – 700,000
Quizás (2002) - 105,000 equivalent albums
Mentiroso – 300,000
Other tracks – 400,000
7 (2003) - 135,000 equivalent albums
Addicted – 400,000
Not In Love – 300,000
Other tracks – 200,000
Insomniac (2007) - 788,000 equivalent albums
Do You Know? – 2,750,000
Tired Of Being Sorry – 500,000
Other tracks – 2,000,000
Euphoria (2010) - 2,438,000 equivalent albums
Cuando Me Enamoro – 1,000,000
I Like It – 6,000,000
Heartbeat – 750,000
No Me Digas Que No - 500,000
Tonight - 5,000,000
Dirty Dancer - 2,000,000
Other tracks - 1,000,000
Sex And Love (2014) - 1,710,000 equivalent albums
I Like How It Feels – 1,000,000
Finally Found You - 1,500,000
Loco – 1,000,000
I'm A Freak– 1,000,000
Bailando - 3,500,000
Noche Y De Día - 200,000
Heart Attack - 750,000
El Perdedor - 1,500,000
Other tracks - 1,000,000
Orphan Album - 803,000 equivalent albums
Takin' Back My Love - 1,000,000
El Perdón - 1,750,000
Duele El Corazón - 600,000
Total tracks – 2,000,000
Streaming Sales
Below table lists Spotify streaming of all songs from the albums we are studying. The Comprehensive Streaming is reached by multiplying Spotify figures by 68/26. In fact, https://www.ifpi.org/downloads/GMR2016.pd f" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">as shown in IFPI 2015 Report, there were 68 million paying subscribers to all streaming platforms by the end of 2015. While the exact count of Spotify paying subscribers by the end of 2015 is unknown, that figure reached 20 million in June 2015 and 30 million in March 2016, thus an estimated 26 million is used as of the end of 2015.
The equivalent album sales is the division of the comprehensive streaming figure by 1500 as it is now the norm in the new industry model.
Streaming Part 1 – Early Spanish Album
While the third album doesn't seem to be very well remembered - except for Nunca The Olvidaré -, the first two ones have a bunch of very successful hits, especially Enrique Iglesias, his first output. His debut provided him with over 50,000 equivalent albums sold and all of its track, including non-singles, have reached at least 1 million streams on Spotify.
Streaming Part 2 – Getting global
With both Enrique and Escape, Enrique Iglesias got truly massive worldwide, although those eras seem long gone by now.
Still, the modern streaming information shows those two titles are far from forgotten. Bailamos has over 22 million streams via Spotify, whereas Be With You crossed the 10 million mark recently. Those two songs, coupled with the rest of the album, generated almost 97,000 sales via streaming platforms overall.
Escape, not surprisingly, is in an even better position with over 165,000 equivalent albums sales. Of course, this album features arguably Enrique Iglesias' biggest track of his career, Hero, now with 58 million streams on Spotify plus 8 million for the Spanish version of the track.
Streaming Part 3 - More success
Quizás and 7 are probably in a difficult situation as they were released at probably Enrique Iglesias' softest time in his career, as proven by their small equivalent sales via streaming, both at 22,000 units sold. Mentiroso -from the album Quizás- was the only notable hit from that era and yet it hasn't reached 3 million streams.
From that point of view, Insomniac was a nice return to form with almost 116,000 equivalent album sold are nothing to be ashamed of. On the contrary, it is quite a strong total which precedes the streaming era, by the way. Do You know? is one of his biggest pre 2008 / Spotify songs with over 18 million plays on that platform.
Streaming Part 4 - Recent trends
We conclude the fourth part. We enter the streaming era wih Euphoria, definitely a successful project, at over 430,000 equivalent albums sales. I Like It, Heartbeat, Dirty Dancer, No Me Digas Que No and especially Cuando Me Enamoro were all strong hit singles, all of them popular collaborations.
Sex And Love, fully released after the boom of streaming, was absolutely huge through this new way of consuming music, correlative, of course, of his declining pure albums sales. Iglesias switched from one format to the other in a very successful way. The proof? His last album to date managed a tremendous 1,22 million equivalent albums sold, not far from what it did as a pure album, both with physical and digital sold.
And last but not least, his Orphan Album track add up a further 1,238,000 albums sold, with Duele El Corazón and El Perdon being the strongest ones with a huge 580 million combined.
In terms of album sales equivalent, Bailando added to Duele El Corazón and El Perdon are on more than 1,6 million units. It is important to notice this is roughly half what a trio of huge English hits would do. This 2 to 1 ratio, in comparison to the 5 to 1 ratio verified in the physical era should be hugely highlighted. In fact, it shows how the Music Industry map will be redistributed. Spanish acts will get way bigger thanks to big countries in terms of inhabitants that had historically relatively low music markets. The key point isn't on Spanish acts only, indeed, Chinese artists, Indian ones and even African artists can expect much higher returns to their success in the future as streaming is poised to penetrate those areas way more than physical sales ever did.
Full Length related records Sales
In more than two decades as an active act, Enrique Iglesias has been no stranger to other type of releases which includes a bunch of other full length records in multiple formats. He hasn't exactly flooded the market with many compilations, but he did put out a few, although he never issued a standalone music video so far.
Full Length Migration - Compilations and remix album
Overall, five full length records, which managed 5,3 million sold combined. Two albums, the singer debut effort Enrique Iglesias and his biggest one Escape, are two strong contributors to the main titles thanks to the solid tracks listed on them. The fourth album, Enrique, is the biggest one, heavily helped by Bailamos which features on both Spanish and English compilations.
Most post Escape albums -that is from 2002 onwards-, in contrast, don't increase much their respective tallies. In the case of Quizás and 7, this is due to their lack of a true huge hit, while both Euphoria and Sex And Love are too recent to have their songs included into compilation albums.
ENRIQUE IGLESIAS CAREER CSPC RESULTS
So, after checking all figures, what's the most successful album by Enrique Iglesias and how many overall equivalent albums sales has he achieved? Well, at this point we barely need to do the addition of all figures defined all over this article!
[xyz-ips snippet="updatedCSPCalbums"]
And there you have it!
What to note? Escape maintains its status as Enrique Iglesias' biggest album to date, albeit with 11,7 million copies sold based on our CSPC's approach. His album Enrique, in the same way, confirms its strong position amongst his records, notching up a tally just over 10 million CSPC's sales overall.
The first three albums all achieved incredible results for Spanish records, especially his debut title, Enrique Iglesias, with 5,5 million CSPC overall.
His most recent albums, Euphoria and Sex And Love, achieve the highest increases from pure album sales to CSPC overall total as they belong to the digital era more than any previous record. The former jumps from 1,35 million to 4,25 million, whilst the latter does so from 1,5 million to 4,4 million, both more than 100% rises. Those figures reflect the previous comment on Latin acts poised to turn bigger in the future as streams take over former album sales. We already knew Enrique's strength there since his first two albums are two of the biggest selling Spanish albums ever. Plus, their streaming figures are still going very strong and streaming overall is nowhere near from having achieved its peak.
Overall, Enrique Iglesias has cumulative CSPC's sales of 52,8 million, a nice round-up figure for one of the biggest Latin acts of all time.
As usual, feel free to comment and / or ask a question!
Sources: IFPI, Spotify, Billboard, Chartmasters.org.
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Hello dear Hernàn congratulations for CSPC analysis for Enrique Iglesias; I would like to know if this week you also analyzed other artists or groups. I hope that you analyzed the Fab Four ( The Beatles).
I look forward to your reply !!!
Hi everyone!
I reversed MJD’s formulas to determine the CSP for each track. We could interpret this as the CSP total “due to” a track, so its success.
I have calculated the top 10 below (All songs):
Song [Album] = CSP total (millions sales equivalent)
Hero [Escape] = 6,90
Bailamos [Enrique] = 5,06
Nunca te olvidaré [Cosas De La Vida] = 1,76
Bailando [Sex And Love] = 1,75
Enamorado por primera vez [Vivir] = 1,72
Be With You [Enrique] = 1,62
Sólo en ti [Vivir] = 1,61
Escape [Escape] = 1,54
Could I Have This Kiss Forever [Enrique] = 1,39
Experiencia Religiosa [Enrique Iglesias] = 1,21
Two big hits at the turn of the century, and after that a lot of tracks with a more modest success... Will he return to the top of the charts?
If you have any question/remarks about the method/calculation I used to obtained these numbers, I will be pleased to answer you.
Tony
I'd love to see how Shakira, Jennifer Lopez and Ricky Martin compare to these stats. Are you planning to do them later?
Hello Martin,
The aim of ChartMasters.org is very precisely to bring back some accuracy rather than repeated fanciful claims found on fansites or Wikipedia pages. All information provided here is backed by official and legitimate sources unlike what you have most likely read before.
Please, can you do Ricky Martin? Do you know if he might have sold more than Enrique? Thanks.
''Enrique Iglesias'' has sold more than 8 millions,''Escape''-more than 10 millions, ''Vivir''-more than 5 millions,''Cosas del amor''(not Cosas de la vida,the title you've written is wrong)-more than 4 millions,''Enrique''-more than 10 millions,''Escape''-more than 10 millions,''Quizas''-more than 500 000 in USA,''Euphoria''-4 millions,''Sex and love''-more than 4 millions. You should update your information!
There are his other albums with more than 1 million sales you've not included!
Hi Sara,
Or maybe you should update your sources 😉
All numbers you claim are ridiculously inflated. Accurate and official data is known, there is no reason to invent fanciful numbers to inflate an artist.
The typo is fixed.
