What was the best-selling album in 1979?
Sometimes you embark on a road trip so long that your playlist no longer cuts it. In a frenzy of boredom, you start scouring the airwaves, trying to find a radio station that will satisfy your entertainment needs. Against all my own expectations, a radio station I’ve regularly turned to in times of need is Heart 70s, desperately hoping to get my fix of music’s best decade. Because, despite what anyone tells you, the 1970s was music’s best decade.
Sure, the radio station forces me to sit through a fair share of duds. The introduction of Jimmy Buffett’s ‘Margaritaville’ indeed marks the moment for much-needed silence, while the opening piano melody of The Clash’s ‘Rock The Casbah’ can make any stretch of dreary motorway feel exciting.
But of course, these radio stations shuffle through a collection of hits, and we know that the decade was where the art form of the album truly flourished. In the decade prior, The Beatles had begun laying the foundations of what long-form art in music could look like. Ideas were allowed to sprawl from one song to the next, and narrative messaging was woven through several tracks, reading like a novel of sorts.
Thanks to The Beatles, fans became more open-minded as to how they were willing to consume music. The boundaries had been completely removed, and suddenly, prog-rock epics like The Dark Side of the Moon became chart behemoths, satiating the appetite of curious music fans all over.
What’s more than that was that the decade boasted a wealth of riches for music fans. The seed of rap was planted with Gil Scott-Heron, disco was fighting every ounce of rock’s desperate criticism to fill dancefloors all over the world, while disillusioned youngsters were responding to the rallying cries of punk. Music fans all over the world had artists whom they could wholeheartedly put their faith in.
And so the charts were diversified. No longer did they say The Beatles and Elvis Presley, all the way from one to ten, especially by the end of the 1970s. By 1979, the impact of the ‘70s shift had been absorbed, the foundations of those two iconic artists had been suitably built upon, and the sights were now firmly set on the brave new future waiting in the 1980s.
Subtle electronica was filtering into popular music, and much to the dismay of traditional fans, disco and rock were finally coexisting, partly thanks to Blondie, who combined the sensibilities of both genres to great effect in late 1978 with their album Parallel Lines. In fact, the album spoke so strongly to a generation of music fans craving innovation that, despite its release in ‘78, it went on to become the UK’s best-selling album in 1979, selling 1.7million copies.
What was the best-selling album of the entire 1970s?
As the decade progressed, the idea of innovating music became more prevalent. What started with a Beatles swansong ended in Blondie’s disco-come-rock fusion in 1978. The appetite for music grew with every year, and so you would think that the biggest seller came towards the end.
But in the UK, it was, in fact, Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge over Troubled Water. Released in 1970, it was never beaten for the remaining decade, selling 2.6million copies in total. The songwriting epic became a benchmark for creativity within the decade, and its success proves how healthy the appetite for music was in a decade relatively devoid of commercial baselessness.
A point further proven by the record that sold the most globally. The definitive prog-rock album, The Dark Side of the Moon, was by no means commercially driven, yet it still became the dominant record of the decade, selling 45 million copies worldwide.
