CSPC: Shakira Popularity Analysis

The football World Cup is currently flooding media from everywhere. No artist is more linked to this competition than Shakira. During each of the last 4 World Cups, she got a huge hit. Whenever, Wherever in 2002, Hips Don’t Lie in 2006, Waka Waka in 2010 and Dare (La La La) in 2014, we are left wondering if her new song Clandestino will take over the same one as these previous summer anthems.

It wasn’t always easy for the Colombia superstar. She started with two anonymous albums, Magia and Peligro, when she was only a teenager. These two records will be ignored in this study as they hardly sold a thing and got removed from the market for decades on the demand of the artist herself. With her 1995’s third album Pies Descalzos Shakira hasn’t only got successful, she became massive, huge enough to cross over boundaries of Latin America. The fourth effort was so strong too that breaking the global audience was inevitable. This unstoppable rise to the top reached its peak with 2001’s set Laundry Service and it’s monster single Whenever, Wherever. Her first worldwide smash, not her last.

Her special nature makes harder to compare her success with the one of remaining pop stars. Shakira continues to release most of her material in Spanish along with English versions. Of course, as popular as she may be in Latin countries, those are still fairly weaker markets than English-speaking ones. So, when taking into account everything, how does she perform against the US / UK icons?

As usual, I’ll be using the Commensurate Sales to Popularity Concept in order to relevantly gauge her results. This concept will not only bring you sales information for all Shakira‘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, 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.