This Is the Best-Selling Pop Album of All Time

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jul 30, 11:00AM EDT

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This Is the Best-Selling Pop Album of All Time — © Courtesy of MJJ Productions

Billboard has dozens of bestseller lists by category that range from country to rock to Christian, dance and Latin. Among these categories is pop. One of pop’s subcategories is adult contemporary, so the criteria of the albums and songs are not uniform. According to some sources, pop first became a category in the early 1990s.

Billboard began listing the 200 top-selling albums in 1967, when rock bands like The Beatles and Led Zeppelin had some of the earliest record-breakers. However, these were part of other categories then. In the ‘70s and ‘80s, soul, disco, R&B and funk began to influence the charts, with multiple hit albums from Michael Jackson, as well as chart-toppers from Prince, the Bee Gees and Lionel Richie. The ‘90s brought both rap and country into the mainstream, including four top albums from pop country star Garth Brooks, who is well-represented among the 40 most popular country music albums of all time.

24/7 Tempo has picked the best-selling pop albums since Billboard started keeping track. Of the top 100 finalists, a quarter are by female musicians (counting bands with a female lead singer). Country crossover stars Shania Twain and Taylor Swift each boast three on the list. The sub-genres of pop represented in the list span the spectrum from country to rock to rap to R&B. An outlier on the list is the 1994 soundtrack to Disney’s “The Lion King,” featuring multiple songs written and performed by Elton John.

To determine the best pop album of all time, 24/7 Tempo developed an index based on three metrics: the number of weeks an album spent on the Billboard 200; its positions on the chart (one week at No. 1, for instance, being worth 200 times more than a week spent at No. 200); and total certified U.S. album sales according to the Recording Industry Association of America. All metrics were evenly weighted.
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The best-selling pop album of all time was “Thriller,” released in 1982 by Michael Jackson. Its certification was an extraordinary 33X multi-platinum. Its time on the Billboard 200 was 469 weeks.

Click here to see the 100 best-selling pop albums of all time.
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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.