This Is the Best Album of All Time

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Nov 2, 7:30AM EDT

Follow 24/7 Wall St. on Google

This post may contain links from our sponsors and affiliates, and Flywheel Publishing may receive compensation for actions taken through them.

This Is the Best Album of All Time — © Thinkstock

There are two basic ways to measure an artist’s popularity over time: by best-selling singles and by best-selling albums. The second is a better way to view an artist’s legacy. It is a large part of a body of work, which sometimes spreads over decades.

The first “microgroove long-playing phonographs” were introduced in 1948, according to Wired. Superstar Elvis Presley’s first album was released in 1958. By that time, albums had become a mainstay of how artists reached their public. Albums began to emerge in two genres: those made in a studio and live recordings of concerts.

The era of the album might be coming to an end, however. In this singles-heavy, streaming world, album sales are in decline. According to Billboard, the most recent year that they posted an increase in sales was 2011. In 2020, overall album sales across all formats were down by 9.2%. But there’s still a place for albums. Listening to a favorite song is one thing, but taking the time to take in a complete album from start to finish with no interruption offers a totally different experience.

To determine the best album of all time, 24/7 Tempo reviewed the rankings in Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, published in September 2020. Considering only those albums, we developed an index based on Billboard chart performance and certified U.S. unit sales. An inverted ranking of an album’s performance on the Billboard 200 album charts (wherein a week at position number 200 is worth one point, a week at position number 199 two points and so on up to a week at position number 1 worth 200 points) was included in the index and given full weight. Certified U.S. unit sales in the United States came from the Recording Industry Association of America and were also given full weight.
[nativounit]
The best album of all time was Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” Here are the details:

Release date: December 30, 1982
Peak position on Billboard 200: #1 (for 37 weeks)
Total weeks on Billboard 200: 479
Certified U.S. unit sales: 33 million

Click here to see all the best albums of all time.
[wallst_email_signup]

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.