What is the biggest selling record of all time?
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M$2 Answers
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M$
According to the table below, which is serious effort to add up the best country-by-country data, Thriller sold 46.75m worldwide. Some of the others in the list are quite surprising!
http://www.ukmix.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=38582&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0
The country data used to make the table comes from sites like the RIAA in the USA, which has the following US album all-time sales chart:
http://www.riaa.com/goldandplatinumdata.php?table=tblTop100
The best selling single of all time seems to be Elton John's Candle in the Wind, 1997 version, commemorating Princess Diana. Various sources have that selling 37m worldwide.
http://philbrodieband.com/muso_solo_bestselling_singles.htm
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M$
That's a good point about the record companies, because I do find it a little odd that Thriller could have sold more than twice the next on the list, but I was willing to trust that number because a bunch of the sources said it. But, like you said, they could have been from the same original source.
Either way, I'm not that great of a researcher.
Strangely, when you look at the sources that Wikipedia lists for the Thriller sales figure, they don't say what the article says. Maybe some fan was a little bit over eager in their editting.
Some of them do say 100m+. A lot of them are British newspapers, probably all quoting the same original source. Would be interesting to know what it was. It may have been the Guiness Book of World Records which several sources mention in passing. But this other site says that book says "over 50m".
http://www.allmichaeljackson.com/therecords.html
The wikipedia article on Michael Jackson says:
"It is often cited as the best-selling album of all time, with worldwide sales between 47 million and 109 million copies.[25][26][27]"
Well I think that's about as much effort as I want to put into finding out how many Thriller sold! Certainly seems to be the biggest selling album anyway.
Some discussion of the stats in a fan forum here if you want to investigate:
http://www.mjjcommunity.com/forum/showthread.php?t=60068
Sounds like record companies aren't above manipilating figures. :)
Hmm... I looked at the sources, and most seemed to say 100-109 million