Back in 2003, the Amy Lee-led band Evanescence took the world by storm thanks to the super smash hit Bring Me To Life. Everyone though the band was here to stay.

Their last top 10 hit was way back in 2006 yet and they haven't even issued a proper album since 2011. How relevant really is the band then?

In fact, it all started very well. Bring Me To Life instantly shot to #1 for multiple weeks in the UK. In the US, it was limited to a #5 in an airplay-fueled ranking that favored urban songs. In both cases, it strongly over performed the remaining rock songs.

Thanks to its success, the album Fallen also shot to the first positions of rankings from everywhere.

Going Under failed to click back a few months later. The band was at risk to remain forever a one-hit-wonder, but that's when My Immortal re-ignited the LP in early 2004.

Since that point, it has been many years of struggle for the band. They flooded airwaves so much back then that one may wonder if they really were that big to virtually disappear in less than a decade.

As usual, I'll be using the Commensurate Sales to Popularity Concept in order to relevantly gauge his results. This concept will not only bring you sales information for all Evanescence's albums, physical and download singles, as well as audio and video streaming. In fact, it will also determine their true popularity.

If you are not yet familiar with the CSPC method, below is a nice and short video of explanations. I fully recommend watching it before getting into the sales figures. Of course, if you are a regular visitor feel free to skip the video and get into the numbers directly.

The Commensurate Sales to Popularity Concept (CSPC)

There are two ways to understand this revolutionary concept. In the first place, there is this Scribe video posted below. If you are unaware of the CSPC method, you will get the full idea within just a pair of 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!

Evanescence' Album Sales

Original Album Sales - Comments

This kinda hurts. When you divide your sales album after album by 2, it's not good. When the division factor is 3, your popularity is on a free fall.

Sales of Evanescence's albums have been divided by 4 both times, from 16 million to 4 million to 1 million.

It's true that the band started incredibly strong. At 16.73 million pure sales, Fallen ranks 8th among the top selling albums of the 00s.

The record smashed in North America, in Latin America, in Europe, in Asia, in Oceania. A true global hit album. It also continues to sell quite well.

The Open Door was already a struggle in comparison. It basically sold only as the follow up of a monster record.

Then, by 2011 not much was left from their fan base as their eponymous title barely sold a million when all was said and done.

Please notice that Synthesis from 2017 is listed among compilations.

Evanescence' songs sales

Physical Singles

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

Mid-00s were atypical for this format. The US had definitely got rid of it, but Europeans and Australians were still buying them.

Evanescence did very well in both areas. Bring Me To Life went to #1 in both the UK and Australia, #2 in Germany, and #5 in France. It sold 265,000 units, give or take 75,000, in each of these markets. That was enough for 1.3 million sales globally.

Going Under peaked at #13-#16 all over Europe and in Australia, with only the UK that gave it a top 10 placing at #8. It was thus a more modest seller as shown by its tally of 200,000 units.

My Immortal was way more successful but the primary impact was seen with the explosion of Fallen sales, rather than its own results. It still moved nearly half a million.

Following singles, both because of the decreasing market and their lower and lower success, sold poorly.

Digital songs

As a reminder, the weighting is done with a 10 to 1,5 ratio between one album and one digital single.

2003 is when the iTunes Store was first launched in the US. It was still a tiny app at first.

That's why Fallen singles sold next to nothing during their promotional campaigns. Both Bring Me To Life and My Immortal remained highly popular through the years though.

After more than a decade of catalog sales, they add for a very healthy total of 10 million units, making them some of the biggest digital songs that preceeded iTunes.

The market was already pretty sweat in 2006 in the US, plus ringtones were popular too. Call Me When You're Sober was highly anticipated, but it failed to perform that well although it still moved over 2 million units.

Later songs were definitely discreet singles. Even the healthy market of 2011 hasn't push their new titles to reach half a million sales.

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 * 3.05 (consistent with Gaon streaming numbers)
– Japan : AWA streams * 100/5.5 (AWA has 5.5% of the Japanese streaming market)
– Elsewhere : Spotify streams * (370 – 8.5 – 9.5 – 33 - 9) / 207 (370 million global subscribers minus 8.5 million from South Korea minus 9.5 million from Japan minus 33 million from China divided by the number of Spotify only users minus 9 million more Asian users) + Genie streams * 3.05 (uses Genie rather than Spotify to extrapolate markets like Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam)

Video Streams
– China* : Xiami streams * 125/6.5 (Xiami has just over 5% of the Chinese streaming market)
– Elsewhere : Youtube views

*since 96.4% of Chinese streaming platforms are free users, that paid-for users pay less than $2 a month and that they are also used as video streaming platforms, their streams are weighted in par with YouTube streams.

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

Equivalent Albums Sales (EAS) = ( Spotify * 310/207 + Genie * 3.05*2 + AWA * 100/5.5 ) / 1500 + ( Xiami * 125/6.5 + YouTube ) / 11750

Top Hits

It's both incredible and sad that album cuts of Fallen like Hello and Tourniquet out-perform in streaming platforms their legitimate singles from 2011.

Of course, Fallen raised the bar very high. Indeed, all its songs have been streamed more than 10 million times on Spotify, a very rare feat for a record as old.

Numbers of the pair of smashes still catch our eyes. Bring Me To Life and My Immortal are close to 300 million and 200 million, respectively. Both crack 800 million views on YouTube too.

Asian statistics are of interest. Going Under appears to be their top song on Japanese site AWA, while Chinese Xiami sees Hello do very well.

In any case, the recipient of this success is always the same, Fallen. Unbelievably, the album is on its way to break 1 million equivalent album sales from streams.

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.

Evanescence' compilations 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.

The distribution process

How to understand this table? In the example of Anywhere But Home, these figures mean it sold 2,430,000 units worldwide. The second statistics column means all versions of all the songs included on this package add for 944,318 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 the Fallen album are responsible for 97% of the Anywhere But Home track list attractiveness. This means it generated 2,364,000 of its 2,430,000 album sales and so forth for the other records. We then apply this process to all compilations present on below table.

Compilations sales figures listing

With a discography made of only 3 studio albums, there is not much material in this compilation section.

We still have their original debut, Origin, as well as the 2017 true-false new album, Synthesis, which contains mostly new interpretations of previous hits.

As a bonus, please find below the breakdown of the big seller Anywhere but Home.

Full Length related records Sales – Summary

Here is the most underestimated indicator of an album’s success – the amount of compilation sales of all kinds it generated. Due to the dependency of sales of the original studio albums on these releases, they are a key piece of the jigsaw.

These numbers are obtained by applying the method from the section The distribution process to all packages listed under Compilation sales figures listing category.

Expectedly, we notice that the huge majority of these sales have been powered by songs of Fallen.

Total Album (all types) Sales per Country

Please note country-specific numbers may miss sales of a few minor releases, although totals are complete.

Evanescence Career CSPC Results

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

Albums CSPC results

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Are Evanescence a one-album wonder? No doubt, yes. Now that we said that, we can't overlook the outstanding total of Fallen.

The album records huge numbers from every format, ultimately closing in at 22.77 million equivalent album sales.

That makes it the 7th most successful of the 00s, and the biggest of era since 2000 to date that had yet to be studied with our CSPC methodology.

The band's career total is a few copies away from 30 million equivalent album sales to date. No doubt ongoing sales and streams of their debut will push them over this mark quickly.

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. 2003 - Evanescence - Bring Me to Life [Fallen] - 9,380,000
2. 2003 - Evanescence - My Immortal [Fallen] - 6,520,000
3. 2003 - Evanescence - Going Under [Fallen] - 2,480,000
4. 2006 - Evanescence - Call Me When You're Sober [The Open Door] - 1,920,000
5. 2006 - Evanescence - Lithium [The Open Door] - 1,210,000

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

Discography results

Thanks to our new ASR (Artist Success Rating) concept, we know that their sales represent 22.46 million times the purchase of their entire discography. Coupled with their total sales, it translates into an ASR score of 147.

It is similar to the score of artists like Michael Bublé, Christina Aguilera, and NSYNC. The ranking of all artists studied so far is available too at this link.

Records & Achievements

• At 22,768,000 EAS, Fallen is the 7th most successful album from the 00s.
• At 22,768,000 EAS, Fallen is the 2nd most successful rock album from the 00s.
• At 22,768,000 EAS, Fallen is the most successful album from 2003.
• At 16,730,000 units, Fallen is the 8th best selling album of the 00s.
• At 9,380,000 EAS, Bring Me To Life is the most succesfull song from 2003.
• At 6.520,000 EAS, My Immortal is among the ten most succesfull songs from 2003.

NB: EAS means Equivalent Album Sales.

You may be interested in...

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

To improve your navigation we created several amazing cross-artists lists posted inside the CSPC: Data Collector article. Click on it to see the full listing of all CSPC results compiled so far!

... similar artists

To put figures from this article into perspective, click on the images below to reach career breakdowns of similar artists:

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

Sources: IFPI, Spotify, YouTube, Discogs.