There are reports of huge sales numbers for the new remastered Beatles CDs all around the world. Considering the way they are dominating the Amazon.com best sellers list this is not surprising but I am somewhat surprised by some of the crazy numbers being thrown around.

An HMV spokesperson said that The Beatles are likely to set a new record for most albums in the charts by one artist at any one time. This is most incredible because the box sets actually hurt the overall sales numbers for The Beatles as each sale of the very expensive box sets only counts as a single sale (even though the stereo box set included all of their albums, and the mono box set includes all but 3!) Of course the people who are buying the box sets are not buying the individual albums so instead of getting 14 sales counted (as they would if someone bought all of the pieces of The Stereo Box Set one by one) The Beatles get credit for just one.

Despite the high cost of The Beatles Stereo Box Set it is expected to enter the top 20 album charts in the UK. The UK album charts are released on Sunday and I’ll certainly share the results here.

With the system Billboard uses in the US, The Beatles albums will not be eligible to enter the Billboard 200 (just like Michael Jackson’s albums were not eligible even though he was outselling everyone on the chart) because the Billboard 200 is only eligible to albums released recently.

The Beatles

Become A MusicByDay.com Music Blogger.