What is the best-selling greatest hits album of all time?
The greatest-hits album is never usually considered essential listening in any band’s discography. Every band during their prime is typically concerned with people hearing their work in the context of an album, and if they have a varied career, hearing a collection of their singles can tend to feel like listening to entirely different bands every time a song changes. But there are more than a handful of greatest-hits albums that may as well be as important as their mainline studio records.
Then again, it’s easy to look at some of the biggest rock stars of the 1950s based on their greatest-hits records. Prior to bands like The Beatles turning the medium into an art form, people like Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley were known as singles artists, and aside from the few times when their albums or live performances struck a nerve with people, it was easy for someone to pick up something like The Sun Sessions to get a good idea of what Presley’s music was all about.
Even when the dawn of conceptual rock and roll began, there was no shortage of fantastic greatest-hits records coming out. Elton John’s first major compilation is a one-stop shop for all of his classic hits, and while Queen have gone down many different avenues in their career, their first official best-of collection is a decent place to start when it comes to their body of work. But in terms of the singles market, no one dominated the conversation in the 1970s quite like Eagles.
While they were far from the most adventurous band in the world, the California rockers’ mix of country, rock and beautiful melodies struck a nerve with everyone who wanted to roll their windows down and feel their hair swaying in the breeze. Not many people were coming to their albums for the deep cuts, so when their management proposed to make their first greatest hits record, they practically gave themselves a license to print money.
But how many copies did Eagles’ greatest hits sell?
It would have been nice if the band had any say in the matter, though. According to Don Felder, both Glenn Frey and Don Henley weren’t happy about the fact that they were making a compilation without their permission, but it’s probably easy for them to get over that now, given the fact that it has become the highest-selling albums of the 20th century, sitting at 38 million copies sold.
And compared to their previous albums, Their Greatest Hits (1971-1975) has a fantastic flow throughout its runtime. Their debut album was a little bit shaky, and Desperado had more than its fair share of filler material, but these ten tracks do a great job of balancing their sound, taking fun rockers like ‘Already Gone’ and putting them right next to tunes like ‘Desperado’ and ‘Tequila Sunrise’.
It wasn’t the creative decision that the band wanted to make, but from a financial standpoint, they had set themselves up for one of the biggest victory laps of the 1970s. The band had already had a solid foundation with their last four albums, but as their greatest-hits was climbing the charts, Hotel California became the one album that could serve as a second volume of classics, birthing tunes like the title track, ‘Life in the Fast Lane’ and ‘New Kid in Town’, each of which could stand next to their singles from the previous records.
So while a greatest-hits album serves as a great starting point for someone wanting to check out a band’s material, the first Eagles compilation goes beyond being merely a collection of singles. This was the kind of record that showed them at their absolute peak, and with all of their classics under one roof, they managed to create the type of album that stands above records like Michael Jackson’s Thriller and Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours when looking at the best records of all time.
