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We tend to consider that today's music scene is all about urban artists, but pop singer Dua Lipa came out of nowhere to superstardom in a mere 3 years.
If at first only her songs were recognized by the general public, she is now a household name. Is she selling well though?
Dua Lipa is a British singer born in London in 1995. After signing with Warner Bros in 2015, she quickly started to drop singles to radio stations.
Be The One was her breakthrough, hitting #1 in Belgium in early 2016. It was the first of many hits to come.
Among them are songs like New Rules, One Kiss, Don't Start Now, Levitating, or Cold Heart. She currently stands at 12 UK Top 10 smashes.
Historically, female pop hit makers have been North American artists, we can mention Madonna, Jennifer Lopez, Rihanna, Katy Perry and Ariana Grande to name a few.
Can Dua Lipa reverse this trend and become the first pure pop female from the UK to dominate global charts?
Dua Lipa Album Sales
Original Album Sales - Comments
Expectedly, Dua Lipa pure album sales are not huge. It's the norm for the large majority of artists who debuted after the collapse of pure sales.
The fact that she also sells less in the US isn't helping, but overall she is really gaining traction in this format.
Once you consider that her debut peaked at #44 inside the sales chart with only 2 weeks top 100 in the US, its sales are quite good.
It means the album has got strong legs. In fact, it is still selling steadily new copies week after week.
On its side Future Nostalgia caught up in spite of a much worse market as well as a release during the first European lockdown. It has now moved ahead at 670,000 units.
Combined, these two albums sold 1.27 million units, having moved over a million in 2021.
Dua Lipa songs sales
Below, we list down results from the artist through physical sales, digital sales and streaming.
Please be aware that when the artist is regarded as the lead act, he is rewarded with 100% of these units, while featured acts share among them a 50% piece of the totals.
Physical Singles
As a reminder, the weighting is done with a 10 to 3 ratio between albums and digital singles.
Obviously, physical singles have been a collector item for many years.
Sales in this format are marginal, but the fact that Dua Lipa has multiple releases there is a positive sign of a building fanbase.
Digital Songs
As a reminder, the weighting is done with a 10 to 1.5 ratio between albums and digital singles.
With a career barycenter around 2019, even downloads were mostly dead during Dua Lipa's era.
For example, One Kiss was the most successful song of 2018 in the UK, yet it sold only 244,000 copies for the year.
Add to that smaller success in the US in her first years and a South Korean market which switched to streaming lately, you get no truly big seller for the singer from London.
Most if not all of her singles have been hits through, so they still combine for interesting volumes.
New Rules is the top seller at 1.6 million, with One Kiss cracking a million too.
Countless of singles came out during a 3 years span, with all of them entering the deluxe version of Dua Lipa.
There, IDGAF, Scared to Be Lonely, and Be The One are over half a million sales. No Lie, Blow Your Mind, Hotter Than Hell and Electricity are over 200,000 apiece.
In the meantime, the market continues to go down, with 2022 units reaching ridiculously low amounts.
Don't Start Now was possibly her largest global hit up to that point, but this context limited it at 825,000 units sold so far.
Then both Levitating and Cold Heart felt just as big if not bigger, yet they combine for only 1.35 million.
A pair of singles stand around 250,000 each from Future Nostalgia, they are Physical and Break My Heart.
Her career total is in 8 digits at over 10.3 million sales in digital formats.
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
With only two albums issued so far, Dua Lipa manages the incredible feat of reaching 1 billion streams on Spotify with 6 different songs.
Don't Start Now leads on both Spotify (1.98 billion), Genie (53 million) and AWA (11 million). In the former, it recently moved ahead of New Rules which used to be #1. The track amassed 2.61 million EAS to date.
Speaking about New Rules, it's a solid runner up with 2.57 million EAS, with an especially impressive total on YouTube (3.43 billion).
Levitating is growing fast, now up to the 3rd spot, with soon the highest score from Spotify (1.94 billion). This trio of songs belong to the very biggest league of hits, with over 7 million EAS from streams among them.
One Kiss, IDGAF, Scared to Be Lonely, Break My Heart and Cold Heart are the remaining songs with sales in excess of 1 million EAS. The last one remains recent and seems poised to climb up the ladder in the future.
As many as 7 songs, almost 8, register more than half a million EAS from streams. On top of singles from her self-titled debut, both 2020 songs Break My Heart and Physical are up there.
Both No Lie and Prisoner have their total halved due to their featuring status.
In terms of albums, Dua Lipa scores a stunning 12.4 million EAS. It's the most streamed female album of all-time.
Future Nostalgia has now got time to reach this magnitude of streams as well, posting 10.48 million EAS. Both are among the most successful streaming albums of all-time.
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!
Dua Lipa compilations sales
In this day and age, less and less compilations or music videos are released, especially when someone is as early in her career as Dua Lipa.
She has 3 releases with from 1,500 to 10,000 sales, they are 2017 EPs The Only EP and Live Acoustic along with 2020 remix album Club Future Nostalgia.
Total Album (all types) Sales per Country
Please note country-specific numbers may miss sales of a few minor releases, although totals are complete.
Dua Lipa Career CSPC Results
So, after checking all the figures, how many overall equivalent album sales has each Dua Lipa album achieved? Well, at this point we only need to add up all of the figures defined in this article!
Albums CSPC results
[xyz-ips snippet="updatedCSPCalbums"]
Of course, pure sales are not enormous. These days are over, and more for pop stars who rely on general public appeal rather than fandom.
It takes off nothing from the amazing success of both Dua Lipa albums. Combined, they hit 25.5 million, with the second far from being done.
The debut album posts 14 million sales, one of the most successful albums in recent years.
Future Nostalgia is on its way to get there as well, now up to 11.5 million.
The total to date of Dua Lipa is at 27.53 million equivalent album sales. She still has a lot of work to do to join the all-time top performers or even of the last 15 years, but she has undoubtedly a very successful career in the making.
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. 2017 - Dua Lipa - New Rules [Dua Lipa] - 2,930,000
2. 2019 - Dua Lipa - Don't Start Now [Future Nostalgia] - 2,900,000
3. 2020 - Dua Lipa ft. DaBaby - Levitating [Future Nostalgia] - 2,610,000
4. 2018 - Calvin Harris & Dua Lipa - One Kiss [Dua Lipa] - 2,040,000
5. 2017 - Dua Lipa - IDGAF [Dua Lipa] - 1,830,000
6. 2017 - Martin Garrix & Dua Lipa - Scared to Be Lonely [Dua Lipa] - 1,630,000
If you feel inspired by this list, we just created this CSPC Dua Lipa playlist on Spotify!
Discography results
Thanks to our new ASR (Artist Success Rating) concept, we know that her sales represent 15,05 million times the purchase of her discography. Coupled with her total sales, it translates into an ASR score of 115.
The ranking of all artists studied so far is available too at this link.
Records & Achievements
- At 13,978,000 EAS, Dua Lipa is the 2nd most successful album from 2017.
- At 12,387,000 EAS from streams, Dua Lipa is the 3rd most streamed album of all-time, 1st among female albums.
- At 10,480,000 EAS from streams, Future Nostalgia is the most streamed album from 2020, 3rd of all-time among female albums.
- Levitating is the longest running female song ever inside the US Hot 100 chart (77 weeks) and its top 10 (41 weeks).
- At 6, Dua Lipa has the most songs with over 1 billion streams on Spotify among females.
NB: EAS means Equivalent Album Sales.
As usual, feel free to comment and / or ask a question!
Sources: IFPI, Spotify, YouTube, Discogs, Billboard.
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Dua and Billie are really killing it for the newer female artists! I hope FN wins AOTY to allow it to continue to do well in 2021.
so do you predict future nostlagia or folklore being the biggest female album of 2020
also which is rihanna’s anti or ariana grande’s dangerous woman for 2016
Hello !
Thanks for this article very interesting !
I have a question : as songs like One Kiss, Scared to Be Lonely or No Lie have been added lately to the LP (in a complete edition) and are just feats, can we really consider them as part of her first album ? Because they add more than 3 million EAS, it's huge
I believe that "Folklore" - Taylor Swift; "Future Nostalgia" - Dua Lipa, & "The Album" - Blackpink, are the biggest female albums of 2020 (according to Chartmasters methodology, with proper weighted China sales, obviously)
And, as of 2019 "Dangerous Woman" had the lead, by 150k. I don't see "Anti" surpassing, especially since Grande's album still has a big gap with "Anti" on spotify (DW leading)
Hey MJD, first of all, thank you for this amazing analysis of Lipa's career CSPC.
The last thing i expected was an album, released in the streaming era, by an artist that debuted in it, surpassing 10m CSPC in only 3 years.
Future Nostalgia is also pulling amazing numbers, 4 million in less than a year is truly impressive.
Do you think "Future Nostalgia" will take the lead in US pure sales? It just shocked me that it almost surpassed her debut album.
Coming to be one of the biggest popstars of the 2020s decade, her power freaks me out.
While she started off mostly big in the UK is she definitely gaining some momentum in the US, Latin America and most recently France. I can see FN catching up to her debut in many places, including the US during 2021.
Definitely FN
Taylor has already moved on from folklore after 5 months to evermore whereas Dua has been promoting FN since Taylor was on lover.
It’s also set to get a rerelease this year which should be huge.
Shouldn't there be an adjustment in points or a redistribution into another category for songs where she was not the primary artist (despite recieving credit as a lead, it wasn't originally from her own project and she was not first in the credits for that reason) that were later tacked onto a re-release/deluxe version of the album? "One Kiss" was a Calvin song. Dua got the lead credit because she's a big enough act to demand that. She eventually tacked it onto her debut LP because Calvin scrapped his plans for his own studio album with that sound, but it seems a bit disingenuous to add that song's stats to her debut album. Same situation with "Electricity".
Those songs really should go into the 'Orphan' category IMO. They were never intended to be part of her debut album. What most likely happened is that her team were clever enough to have a clause in the contract that allowed her to add them onto her own release on streaming/digital if the primary artists (Calvin, Silk City) did not include them on their own studio album. That's a lot of conjecture but it also doesn't seem right to include all those points into her debut LP, 10M+ points for it seems absurd, that's higher than Billie's debut album.
Personally I think those songs should be going into the Orphan category. Imagine if they suddenly add "Un Dia (One Day)" onto Future Nostalgia---sure, technically I guess the points can now go towards it, but is that really an accurate way of measuring the album's success? That song was clearly meant as a collaboration with reggaeton artists outside of the FN project and Dua is not the primary artist. A distinction needs to be made between "feature", "lead", and "primary" artists. For example, in Dua's latest Future Nostalgia add-on, "Fever" with French singer Angele, both are lead artists, however Angele cannot be considered the primary artist because it's for Dua's project, she's first in the credits, her label is handling the release, etc. If Angele tacks on Fever to her next LP does it make sense for those points to go to her as well? Would that really be an accurate, effective way of measuring the popularity of that album of hers?
Removing "No Lie", "One Kiss", "Electricity" and "Scared to be Lonely" from Dua's debut album, it's at roughly 5.14M CSPC. A great total and one that seems much more realistic.
Her Orphan section would then go up to roughly 5.7M CSPC, which seems realistic considering all those hits before mentioned.
What I've clearly explained in the other posts in this comment section that you conveniently ignored---those songs were not meant for Dua's album in the first place, she was not the primary artist, and just because they were tacked on to the streaming/digital editions after months doesn't mean including their points accurately reflects the popularity of her debut album. They belong in the Orphan category, or at the very least their points need to be significantly weighed down for Dua's album.
i personally think songs like "No Lie" "One Kiss" and "Scared To Be Lonely" should be in the orphan section since they were added to the album ages after they were released as a cheap move to draw in streams by her record label and make the album seem bigger than it is, her debut album is kind of a compilation...
same thing with "prisoner" and "Un Dia" in Future Nostalgia... she's not even the lead artist in those songs
