Best-selling Albums By Year In The United States
This is a list of the best-selling albums by year in the United States. Billboard magazine began publishing year-end lists for album sales in 1956. Until 1991, the Billboard album chart was based on a survey of representative retail outlets that determined a ranking, not a tally of actual sales. Likewise, the year-end chart was a measure of chart performance over the twelve months from December to November rather than total sales. Weekly surveys and year-end charts by Billboard and other publications such as Cash Box magazine sometimes differed. For instance, during the 1960s and 1970s, the number-one album as determined by these two publications differed in 10 out of 20 years. From 1991, Billboard year-end and weekly charts were calculated by Nielsen SoundScan.
Harry Belafonte's 1956 record entitled Calyspo was the first product to be recognized as a top-selling album for a year once Billboard magazine started tracking sales figures. Eminem's 2010 rap record Recovery currently holds the title for the US's top-selling digital album. British glam rock performer Elton John and rapper Eminem each have had two of their albums be top sellers in two separate years in the US. Pop singer Michael Jackson's 1982 Thriller became the best-selling record in the country for two consecutive years in the 1980s (and later became the best-selling album of all time). Other albums to achieve the same accomplishment included the My Fair Lady Original Cast Recording from the hit 1950s Broadway production between 1957–1958.
Read more about Best-selling Albums By Year In The United States: 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s
Famous quotes containing the words united states, year, united and/or states:
“Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Canada are the horns, the head, the neck, the shins, and the hoof of the ox, and the United States are the ribs, the sirloin, the kidneys, and the rest of the body.”
—William Cobbett (1762–1835)
“We hold on to hopes for next year every year in western Dakota: hoping that droughts will end; hoping that our crops won’t be hailed out in the few rainstorms that come; hoping that it won’t be too windy on the day we harvest, blowing away five bushels an acre; hoping ... that if we get a fair crop, we’ll be able to get a fair price for it. Sometimes survival is the only blessing that the terrifying angel of the Plains bestows.”
—Kathleen Norris (b. 1947)
“Television is an excellent system when one has nothing to lose, as is the case with a nomadic and rootless country like the United States, but in Europe the affect of television is that of a bulldozer which reduces culture to the lowest possible denominator.”
—Marc Fumaroli (b. 1932)
“I think those Southern writers [William Faulkner, Carson McCullers] have analyzed very carefully the buildup in the South of a special consciousness brought about by the self- condemnation resulting from slavery, the humiliation following the War Between the States and the hope, sometimes expressed timidly, for redemption.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)