What is the fastest-selling album of all-time?
Selling albums quickly is a unique and now long-gone art in the music business. While most executives and record companies are looking for long-term profits, there’s something about the immediate windfall of success that becomes intoxication. You don’t actually need quality material to get a huge chunk of money – you just have to be in the right place at the right time.
As such, the list of fastest-selling albums doesn’t always go hand-in-hand with the biggest-selling albums of all time. Mostly, that’s because the biggest-selling albums of all-time have had a massive jump on the fastest-selling albums of all-time. The former list is riddled with albums that have been in the market for at least 30 years: Thriller, Back in Black, The Dark Side of the Moon, and Queen’s Greatest Hits, among others.
The phenomenon of selling a lot of albums in a short period of time, by contrast, is a more recent occurrence. You need a distinct period in time where physical album sales were still the norm, but also, the internet was pushing albums into massive markets. That means that fastest-selling albums peaked around the end of the 1990s and had a major jump in the mid-2010s, thanks to one artist in particular.
In the United States, there’s no debate as to who has the fastest-selling album of all time. The winner is Adele, and it’s not even particularly close. While NSYNC have the second and third places locked down with their albums No Strings Attached and Celebrity, respectively, they pale in comparison to the first week sales of 25, which totalled just over 3.3 million units sold.
The United Kingdom record is a bit trickier. Officially, Adele is once again on top, thanks to the 803,000 units sold in its first week. But if we’re going by seven-day totals, the top dogs are actually Oasis, who managed to sell 813,000 copies of their infamous 1997 album Be Here Now.
The reason for the discrepancy is that Be Here Now was released on a Thursday, an atypical day for an album release. By official metrics, the first week’s sales of Be Here Now only accounted for the first three days of the album’s availability. Oasis sold 696,000, which was still a record at that time and is good enough to place them in second overall in fastest-selling album records, but because of that Thursday release date, Adele is the official artist with the fastest-selling album on both sides of the Atlantic.
Adele’s status as the queen of fastest-selling albums is unrivalled. She holds the title in Canada and New Zealand as well, and appears in the top five for Germany and France. Luis Miguel is the king of Spanish-language countries, with his album 20 Años being the fastest-selling album in Mexico and his LP Romances being the fastest-selling album in Argentina. In the least surprising news of all, BTS has the three fastest-selling albums in South Korea, with another two albums sliding into the top ten at numbers five and seven as well.
