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The 1970s and ’80s were the peak era of the monster album. Rivalling Hollywood as entertainment’s most commercial venture, the blockbuster LP was overwhelmingly a phenomenon of that special era in the music industry. Forged in the 1960s counterculture and amiably adapting to MTV‘s rapid cultural sea change in the 1980s, the right record with the proper promotion could reach stratospheric levels of success.
It’s hard to envisage a record ever beating the current top ten. The most recent effort to crack 30million sales was Adele’s 21 in 2011, with Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill at 33m, but otherwise the only entries after the 1980s in the coveted ten are The Bodyguard soundtrack and Shania Twain’s country pop behemoth Come On Over.
Bee Gees, Meat Loaf, Fleetwood Mac, Eagles twice, and Pink Floyd all boast 40m or more sales for their biggest albums, stalwarts of classic rock and disco when the album medium’s primacy was at its peak. The Dark Side of the Moon is the highest British entry by a long way, Pink Floyd’s cosmic space rock opus selling an eye-watering amount considering its seemingly experimental progressive front.
We all know the big number one. Surprising even Quincy Jones and the Epic Records team, Michael Jackson’s second adult solo LP Thriller sold godly levels of copies to the tune of 70m reported sales. It’s easy to forget, but Thriller wasn’t an overnight success. Its first single was the twee ‘The Girl Is Mine’ with Paul McCartney which didn’t generate major waves, but in the aftermath of ‘Billie Jean’, ‘Beat It’, and his moonwalking performance NBC’s Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever TV special, Jackson became a serious megastar. Once the ‘Thriller’ video was out, the namesake album was alleged to be selling millions of copies a week.
It’s not a close call, but the artist that boasts the silver medal in global sales comes from a huge name in their field, but nowhere in the presence of the mainstream as the ‘King of Pop’.
So, what is the second-best-selling album ever?
In one of the most extraordinary singer swaps in music history, Australian hard rockers AC/DC jumped from one lauded proto-metal record to another without breaking a sweat, or seemingly the bank. Having first joined production forces with Robert John ‘Mutt’ Lange on 1979’s Highway to Hell, his extra sonic boost to their beefy rock attack brought AC/DC to a new level of fame.
Out drinking in London’s The Music Machine, frontman Bon Scott was found the following morning unresponsive in his car, later declared dead due to “acute alcohol poisoning”. Contemplating calling AC/DC quits, encouragement from Scott’s family resulted in the band reaching out to Geordie’s Brian Johnson to fill Scott’s seriously big shoes.
He was more than a good fit. Playing off the Young brothers‘ stomping guitar heft, Johnson’s high-pitched bellow proved to be the perfect foil for cuts like ‘You Shook Me All Night Long’ and ‘Hells Bells’. Released in 1980, AC/DC’s seventh LP Back in Black went on to sell over 50m reported copies and is the second-biggest-selling album of all time.
AC/DC had a formula and knew how to work it, delivering an unfussy stomper of rockin’ tunes and seismic riffs which duckwalked into the metal world’s affections during its early 1980s flux between NWOBHM, hair metal, and the emerging thrash scene. Like an Australian oddity shaped by the nation’s unique ecosystem, AC/DC was a band cut from an entirely original cloth.
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