Yes, I’m a bit obsessed with the soundscan information I’ve come across. I don’t really know why I find these details of album sales so interesting. It’s not like I think that albums sales have much of anything to do with actual quality. A lot of my favorite bands and albums weren’t particularly good sellers. But, for some reason these kind of trivia fascinates me.

And it really is trivia, that’s the category I should be using for these kind of posts. I’ll go ahead and start categorizing that way now, but I doubt I’ll go back and “fix” the old ones, I’m just too damn lazy.

So anyway, what follows are the top 10 selling artists/bands of the Soundscan era (which began in 1991) up through 2008. I’m going to include their overall numbers along with their numbers specific for 2008 (which I was able to find by subtracting from the totals from the previous years version of this list.) I think it’s interesting to see which of these top selling artists are continuing to chug along making more sales and which are slowing down.

01 - Garth Brooks - 68.143 M - 741K
02 - The Beatles - 57.088 M - 1.393M
03 - Mariah Carey - 51.569M - 1.632M
04 - Metallica - 51.136M - 2.466M
05 - Celine Dion - 50.571M - 879K
06 - George Strait - 40.619M - 1.448M
07 - Tim McGraw - 37.591M - 1.178M
08 - Alan Jackson - 36.520M - 1.254M
09 - Pink Floyd - 35.213M - 760K
10 - Shania Twain - 33.707M - 176K

While I find the numbers for The Beatles and Pink Floyd to be a positive, I’m quite disturbed by how many just absolutely awful redneck (Brooks, Strait, McGraw, Jackson, Twain) and “diva” (Carey & Dion) BS is on this list. But I think over time quality wins out. This crap will slowly fade down the list in the long run while the really good stuff like The Beatles & Floyd will remain.

One important thing to consider when looking at the sales numbers for 2008 is who has recently released a new album? Mariah Carey, Metallica, George Strait, & Alan Jackson released new albums in 2008. Celine Dion & Tim McGraw released new albums in 2007. This is what makes the numbers for The Beatles & Pink Floyd all that much more impressive. The Beatles last truly new album came out in 1970 (Let It Be.) Pink Floyd’s came out in 1994 (The Division Bell.) Of course The Beatles 1 & The Anthology CDs were also very important in padding The Beatles numbers, those 57 million sales weren’t all catalog sales.

How well will The Beatles Remastered CDs sell? I think they only count a sale of each of the Box Sets as just one sale each, so that could hurt the numbers a bit. That’s a bit ridiculous I think. It seems to me that each sale should include a sale for every album that’s inside of the box set, isn’t that really what you’re buying? All of the albums?

Pink Floyd, Soundscan, The Beatles

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