With over 191 million Equivalent Album Sales sold since the beginning of his career, Eminem is one of the most successful artists in the industry overall and the most successful one in hip hop.
The enormity of Eminem’s success is difficult to comprehend, even when we report on his records and milestones daily. Freshly updated streaming and sales numbers put things into perspective – and put Marshall ahead of almost everybody active in the industry now.
Chartmasters.org keeps an eye on streaming and sales numbers of leading artists. Their Commensurate Sales to Popularity Concept (CSPC) brings together albums, physical and download singles, as well as audio and video streaming.
The most recent sales and streaming figures add up the total number of Marshall’s career sales to over 191 million units worldwide. Over 98.6 million sales come from his albums:
The Slim Shady LP (1999) 10,390,000
The Marshall Mathers LP (2000) 23,340,000
The Eminem Show (2002) 23,020,000
8 Mile (2002) 10,330,000
Encore (2004) 11,030,000
Relapse (2009) 4,480,000
Recovery (2010) 8,340,000
The Marshall Mathers LP 2 (2013) 4,770,000
Revival (2017) 1,200,000
Kamikaze (2018) 1,060,000
Music to Be Murdered By (2020) 690,000
We can see that Eminem has five albums with over 10 million sales in his catalogue. Two of them, his all time popular “The Eminem Show” and MMLP – with over 23 million units moved each. They are not only his best selling albums. These two are the best selling albums of all time in hip hop.
Chartmasters provided a detailed breakdown by country to each album.
It also gives exciting insights into Eminem’s popularity. For instance, you can see how literal was Marshall’s comeback with “Recovery”, which recovered his sales with an 85% increase from “Relapse”, its difficult predecessor.
The geographical distribution of Em’s sales also shows how firmly he established his reputation globally. Almost 70% of sales for Marshall’s major debut SSLP are domestic. However, every new release increases Eminem’s presence on the international market. For MTBMB, US sales comprise only 51%, making it the most globally recognised album of Em’s career.
These albums sales figures are supported with unprecedented 14.3 million physical singles sold – from record-breaking 2.23 million copies of “Stan” to the most recent humble 4,000 copies of “the Adventures of Moon Man and Shady”. This result is overshadowed by his downloading numbers – over 206 million.
Having added Marshall’s streaming numbers, Chartmasters come to the total of 190,983,000 Equivalent Album Sales that make Eminem the most successful artist who debuted after 1983 and by far the most successful rapper of all time. Also, Eminem is the 2nd highest-selling artist of all time in downloads and ringtones.
You can read the complete and very detailed analysis on Chartmasters.org.
