The best-selling solo albums by each member of The Beatles
It’s a well-told titbit of Fab Four trivia, but it never fails to astonish that none of The Beatles had hit 30 by the time they wound down.
Barely eight years passed while still counting 11 legit studio albums and a hefty wagon of soundtracks, EPs, and a dizzying flurry of stand-alone singles. It’s hard to imagine the music world ever witnessing such artistic scope at such a whirlwind pace again, Liverpool’s finest burning through Merseybeat pop, psychedelic explosion, and later roots-rock jammers before finally screeching to a halt in 1970.
However, they’d lived in each other’s pockets for years, in Paul McCartney, John Lennon, and George Harrison’s case, stretching back as far as their 1950s teens in their old Quarrymen band. It had to end, and they all knew it. “You were breaking from your army buddies,” McCartney reflected to Mastertapes in 2016. “We used to liken it to the army – you’d been through everything together, and now you weren’t going to see them again.”
Such tugged heartstrings were soured by the mutual bad blood and legal wrangling that followed The Beatles and their Apple ventures, but the definitive close to the Fab Four story stands as a key asset to their enduring fascination. Each album chronicles their maturation from boys to men, pop stars to artists, and marks a close that stopped the quartet from lumbering on like The Kinks or The Rolling Stones with diminishing results.
Still, solo efforts were eagerly pursued by all the Beatles, now freed up to realise the material without anyone’s vetting or approval. Ringo Starr may have suffered more anxiety in this new dawn, while McCartney and Lennon had broken down as a songwriting duo anyway. Harrison reportedly had sat on a wealth of songs dating back to Revolver, ready to unleash to the world. While never touching the heights of their former day job, each Beatle managed to nab some hefty unit sales across the first ten years of their final bow as the world’s biggest band.
So, which solo albums sold the most?
Definitive numbers are hard to pin down, with certified physical sales and modern equivalent album sales muddied by archaic multi-disc counts and fragmented global trackings, but solid estimates reveal a surprising bunch of solo LPs that even outsold some Beatles albums.
Defying the odds, Ringo managed to peak at number two on the Billboard 200 with 1973’s eponymous third effort, the Beatles drummer enjoying a respectable 3.3million sales, helped by all former bandmates lending a songwriting hand across the record, and lead single ‘Photograph’ topping the Hot 100.
Harrison’s solo venture suffers from the multi-disc issue, as his first post-Beatles record was released as a hefty triple-LP, but 1971’s All Things Must Pass is understood to have shifted around 7million, given a boost not long before Harrison’s death when he oversaw a 30th anniversary reissue package.
It won’t be a surprise that Wings’ Band on the Run won McCartney his biggest seller, flogging 9.3million pure sales and widely considered his solo opus. Lennon’s top seller throws a curveball, however. While Imagine stands as his defining LP, 1980’s Double Fantasy initially saw a surge of sales in the wake of his death. 7million copies flew off the shelves in the seven posthumous months, swelling to over 10m in the years since, although Imagine might have crept ahead an extra million when factoring contemporary streaming and download data.
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