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Still only 24, Shawn Mendes already has a long list of sizable streams. The most striking example was the biggest hit of the summer in 2019, Señorita, which led the global Spotify chart during 102 days.
From his days of posting covers on Vine to his current stature, how successful has been the career of the young Canadian pop star?
[expand title="Get to know Shawn Mendes" trigclass="noarrow"]
Shawn Mendes, full name Shawn Peter Raul Mendes, is a Canadian singer-songwriter born in August 8, 1998 in the state of Ontaria. His father and his mother are Portuguese and English, respectively.
Shawn Mendes started sharing covers on video app Vine in 2013 to immediate success. He was quickly signed by Island Records and issued his first and enponymous EP in July 28, 2014. This record debuted straigth at #5 on Billboard 200 Album chart.
4, plus the initial EP as well as 2 live records. Shawn Mendes issued his debut album Handwritten in 2015, follow up Illuminate in 2016, Shawn Mendes in 2018 and Wonder in 2020.
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A big picture of the Shawn Mendes' career
On surface the success of the Canadian singer doesn't seem so obvious. He hasn't got a US top 3 hit until the 2019 summer hits, and he got none either since then.
Songs like Stitches, Treat You Better and There's Nothing Holdin' Me Back went to the top 10 though and enjoyed an impressive lasting appeal. Globally, they all remained charted well over a year on Spotify.
His streams aren't difficult to identify, how is the artist performing in remaining formats yet, like pure album sales and downloads?
The Commensurate Sales to Popularity Concept (CSPC)
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 Shawn Mendes'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.
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!
Shawn Mendes albums sales
Original Album Sales - Comments
Most newcomers haven't been able to build a fan base before the collapse of pure sales which make their success with this format very limited.
Among them, Shawn Mendes is one of the top performing artists. His first 3 releases sold nearly 900,000 units on average, a very good tally for our day and age.
Sales of the last album Wonder have been less positive, especially as the pop star fanbase hasn't embrace the vinyl market so far.
Shawn Mendes 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 Sales
As a reminder, the weighting is done with a 10 to 3 ratio between one album and one physical single.
Once his fanbase was built a few singles started to be released in order to exploit it. That's why his 6 songs available physically are his most recent hits.
Naturally, numbers are low in relative terms and bring next to nothing to the overall tally
Digital Songs
As a reminder, the weighting is done with a 10 to 1,5 ratio between one album and one digital single.
With the recent collapse of downloads, the highest selling song of Shawn Mendes in this format is his first crossover hit, Stitches.
A chart topper in the UK and a top 5 hit in many countries like the US, Germany and Australia, the song has moved over 5 million units to date.
The remaining 3 singles from Handwritten were all moderate hits and stand around a million sales.
Often compared to Justin Bieber as Canadian pop singers, Shawn Mendes repeats one of the sales patterns of the former with strong sales from deep cuts on top of proper singles.
Album tracks of Handwritten sold as much as 1.32 million units, the ones from Illuminate did nearly 600,000 units while his eponymous effort has cuts at almost 300,000 copies.
These two albums also have their share of hits. There's Nothing Holdin' Me Back and Treat You Better sold over 2.5 million a piece while Mercy is at 1.88 million.
From the eponymous LP In My Blood and Señorita lead the way with 890,000 and 1.15 million units, respectively. These are very high numbers for 2018 onwards considering the collapse of occidental countries markets and discontinued South Korean downloads sales.
In the other side, both Wonder and Monster from his last era failed to gain momentum, with low sales up to date.
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 * 100 / 4 (AWA has 4% of the Japanese streaming market)
– Arabic world: Anghami streams
– Sub-Saharan Africa: Boomplay + Audiomack streams
– Elsewhere: Spotify streams * Spotify market shares based on artists' market distribution
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 * ArtistRatio + Genie * 2.20 + AWA * 100 / 4 + Anghami + Boomplay + Audiomack ) / 1500 + ( QQ views* 50(or 5) + YouTube * 1.1 ) / 6750
Top Hits
Shawn Mendes has 4 immensely popular tracks. Treat You Better, Stitches and There's Nothing Holdin' Me Back have all moved 2 million units from streams, which would make them the signature song of most artists
Señorita somewhat manages to top them all with 3.13 million equivalent album sales. It's up to 2.29 billion on Spotify and 3.44 billion on YouTube.
They are all over 1.5 billion streams on Spotify which is incredible in itself, while they all already broke this milestone on YouTube too.
In South Korea (Genie), There's Nothing Holdin' Me Back recently lost the lead to Señorita while in both Japan (AWA) in China (QQ) Stitches remains fans' favorite.
Mercy is also huge for a track which ranks at only 5. It stands at 1.48 million EAS with 1.27 billion streams on Spotify.
A second group of songs aren't as big but still very solid. This includes In My Blood, Lost In Japan, I Know What You Did Last Summer and If I Can't Have You. Both Monster and Wonder are slowly catching up this pack, all with 550,000 - 1.1 million EAS.
On top of all these hits, there are countless more songs which have amassed over 100,000 EAS from streams, in fact, the entire top 40 cracks this mark.
In terms of albums, Shawn Mendes is the biggest with 8.15 million equivalent album sales.
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 fetchs updated Spotify streams as you request them, use it to watch these results grow day after day!
Shawn Mendes 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? If you check this example of the The Shawn Mendes EP, these figures mean it sold 140,000 units worldwide. The second statistics column means all versions of all the songs included on this package add for 417,456 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 Handwritten are responsible for 76% of The Shawn Mendes EP tracklist attractiveness, which means it generated 53,000 of its 140,000 album sales, weighted 0.5 for EPs, and so on for the other records.
Compilations sales figures listing
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.
Total Album (all types) Sales per Country
Please note country-specific numbers may miss sales of a few minor releases, although totals are complete.
Shawn Mendes Career CSPC Results
So, after checking all the figures, how many overall equivalent album sales has each album by Shawn Mendes achieved? Well, at this point we hardly need to add up all of the figures defined in this article!
Albums CSPC results
[xyz-ips snippet="updatedCSPCalbums"]
At his 24, Shawn Mendes already scores 3 albums over 7.8 million equivalent album sales out of 4 releases.
The debut album stands at 7.8 million units so far, it still got topped by the two following albums.
The sophomore effort Illuminate remains his peak up to now with an impressive tally of 9.6 million, while Shawn Mendes isn't too far behind at 9.4 million. Both albums are poised to hit 10 million relatively soon.
The last record is up to 1.9 million which is not as bad as one could have though. It will at least be a multi-million seller, which remains solid.
These results bring the career total of Shawn Mendes to 30.4 million equivalent album sales.
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 - Shawn Mendes & Camila Cabello - Señorita [Shawn Mendes] - 3,590,000
2. 2015 - Shawn Mendes - Stitches [Handwritten] - 3,200,000
3. 2016 - Shawn Mendes - Treat You Better [Illuminate] - 3,010,000
4. 2016 - Shawn Mendes - There's Nothing Holdin' Me Back [Illuminate] - 2,850,000
5. 2016 - Shawn Mendes - Mercy [Illuminate] - 1,980,000
6. 2019 - Shawn Mendes - If I Can't Have You [Shawn Mendes] - 1,260,000
7. 2018 - Shawn Mendes - In My Blood [Shawn Mendes] - 1,250,000
If you feel inspired by this list, we just created this CSPC Shawn Mendes playlist on Spotify!
Discography results
Thanks to our new ASR (Artist Success Rating) concept, we know that his sales represent 15.71 million times the purchase of his entire discography. Coupled with his total sales, it translates into an ASR score of 124.
Records & Achievements
- At 30,360,000 EAS, Shawn Mendes is among the 5 most successful artists born in 1998 or later.
- At 7,786,000 EAS, Handwritten is among the 10 most successful albums from 2015.
- At 9,604,000 EAS, Illuminate is among the 10 most successful albums from 2016.
- At 9,375,000 EAS, Shawn Mendes is among the 10 most successful albums from 2018.
- At 102 days, Señorita is the 3rd longest #1 ever on Spotify global chart.
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...
... Shawn Mendes' streaming masters analysis
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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 similar artists:
Nice Works!
So Shawn Mendes album stands at 710k WW，Well Down.
How Did You Get this.Have You Seen the Full Report of IFPI best-selling albums Of 2018 ?
Nice to see how another younger streaming artist is doing. He's obviously no Bieber but it looks like he has no trouble racking up songs with 1 Billion streams so I imagine he will be fine for a while!
I thought he was doing better, especially on pure sales.
That said, he will certainly grow a lot on on the next decade as he is the most successful under 21 you analyse until now (though a lot other today artists that started young like him were certainly doing better at 21 - you don't have that data but it's not hard to figure that out). He continues to be regularly streamed strongly so all his albums will increase a lot on years to come . His latest album will soon pass his first album on on CSPC (and if he gets another successful song from it can become is best CSPC album). His latest single that is now #05 will also be #04 in a couple of weeks at most.
Hi Gary!
The figure for the album is arrived at based on figures from relevant markets, the last IFPI report has yet to leak!
Meh..
Please do Sam Smith, their gonna release SS3 early next year and it’s been two years since the last update
Though he is not in Weeknd, bieber . bruno or ed's league,his first 3 albums did good wih 22 million equivalents. 4th is such an eye sore. I hope 5th ones puts him back on top again!
me too, I feel like he has so much unreached potential, which sadly I feel will never be left as I am not a fan of the direction his music has been heading in
He fell off big time. Classic case of heartthrob with a mostly female audience who fails to evolve and connect with a wider and older male and female audience, which is essential for long-term success since the teen girl audience is fickle. He is the opposite of Harry Styles, who started similarly with One Direction fans but managed to become a respected artist with more serious music and now has much wider appeal.
do you think after an album that clip and several singles that failed to become a hit, Shawn will be able to comeback or are his hey days behind him already?
He is a 24 year old male artist. I wouldn't count him out because of a few underperformances. He just needs one song that clicks and he can easily get another smash hit.
