CSPC: Shakira Popularity Analysis

Full Length related record 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.

How to understand this table? If you check this example, these figures mean Oral Fixation Tour sold 710,000 units worldwide. Then, the second statistics column means streams of all the songs included on this package add for 1,312,473 EAS.

The second part at the right of the table shows how many streams are coming from each original album as well as the share they represent. Thus, streaming figures tell us Laundry Service songs are responsible for 22% of the Oral Fixation Tour tracklist attractiveness. In other words, it generated 159,000 of its 710,000 album sales. Eventually, we apply this methodology to all compilations.

As nearly all her albums include sizable hits, we can see that they all contributed to sales of these compilation and live sets. It is fairly obvious with the example of Live From Paris. Its track list is the closest we can get to a career spanning compilation and highlights how each and every album from Shakira is home of relevant hits.