Music Sales

Perhaps inexplicably, Queen's Greatest Hits is apparently the best-selling album in British history.  It's evidently sold approximately 5.4 million copies.  I know the numbers in this post are extremely rough, and don't take account of relative populations through time or different methods of calculating sales, but I think we find something interesting, nonetheless.  Let's say the UK has a current population of roughly 61 million people.  Compare that to the US, whose population is about 300 million, and where the supposedly best-selling album of all time is the Eagles' Their Greatest Hits 1971-1975, with 29 million in sales.  So, if we ignore the fact that a single owner of either album might have purchased multiple copies (upgrading, say, from LP to CD), approximately 9% of the British population owns the biggest album in the land, and about 9.7% of the American population owns the biggest album in that land.  I haven't been able to find a quasi-definitive estimation of the biggest-selling album in Canadian history, but it may be telling that the highest level of certification which the Canadian Recording Industry Assocation offers is 2X Diamond, evidencing 2,000,000 copies sold (well, not sold sold - like the RIAA certifications, these are more of a guesstimate of copies shipped).  The question becomes: is a 10% penetration rate the highest that a popular album can expect to achieve?

Comments

[Greg]

I have heard (from Meatloaf himself) that Bat Out of Hell is the best seller in Canadian history and why would he lie?

[MLM]

A little out of date, but this site, http://tinyurl.com/ybo47p , has the skinny on the records that have gone double-diamond (2 million units) in Canada. And yes, Meat Loaf is on there. Among the usual suspects, there are three Shania Twain titles.