It's been a quiet work day, and even more silent on the internet (total email haul thus far: 19 emails, of which 13 were spam, four were from Amazon confirming my purchase of The End of the Affair, leaving two from friends) so I am glad that at approximately 11am I discovered this amazing website. I don't expect that all the Faithful will find it quite as spine-tinglingly gripping as I do, so just to help you understand my excitement, let me copy and paste (and, obviously, reformat) the following list.
The top 20 best-selling albums of all time in the whole wide world are:
01. Thriller - Michael Jackson (60 million)
02. Black In Black - AC/DC (42m)
03. Their Greatest Hits 1971-1975 - The Eagles (41m)
04. Saturday Night Fever soundtrack - Various Artists (40m)
05. Dark Side Of The Moon - Pink Floyd (40m)
06. Come On Over - Shania Twain (39m)
07. The Bodyguard soundtrack - Various Artists (37m)
08. Bat Out Of Hell - Meat Loaf (37m)
09. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band - The Beatles (32m)
10. Led Zeppelin IV - Led Zeppelin (32m)
11. Dirty Dancing soundtrack - Various Artists (32m)
12. Falling Into You - Celine Dion (32m)
13. Let's Talk About Love - Celine Dion (31m)
14. Rumours - Fleetwood Mac (30m)
15. Jagged Little Pill - Alanis Morissette (30m)
16. Titanic soundtrack - Various Artists (30m)
17. Millenium - Backstreet Boys (30m)
18. 1 - The Beatles (30m)
19. Abbey Road - The Beatles (30m)
20. Bad - Michael Jackson (29m)
So much to say, so little time... To condense my inital thoughts:
Dirty Dancing! Hilarious.
How ridiculous that there are no artists who aren't either British or American.
But I'm quite proud of the fact that there are so many Brits.
They've spelled Millenium wrong. By 'they', I don't know if it's the website people, or the Backstreet Boys, or just the whole of America. But it definitely has two ns in it if it's proper.
Also, if you don't count the soundtrack to The Bodyguard as an album by Whitney Houston, then Michael Jackson is the only non-white entrant. And even that's now questionable. Odd.
I'm shocked by the AC/DC entry, in that, I am finding it uncomfortable to admit, I cannot name a single AC/DC song unprompted. I'm sure if you tell me a title, I'll be able to hum it... [goes off to look up AC/DC songs] Nope. I've just looked at their hits on the aforementioned amazing website, and I don't recognise a single one. Also odd.
LLFF fact fans: I own (or have owned but have now lost or given away) 11 of these 20 albums. Can you guess which ones? No? You don't even want to try? OK then. I'll tell you. The albums I own are: Thriller, the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, Dark Side Of The Moon, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Jagged Little Pill, 1 and Bad. The albums I once owned but have now lost are: the soundtrack to The Bodyguard, Bat Out Of Hell and Rumours. And I was sent a review copy of MillenNium back in the day but it's long been deliberately discarded.
With so many incisive discussion points from just one list, you can imagine that I had a feast on the website itself, given the tens of similar trivia lists there are - including songs with the longest titles, songs with the longest titles not including brackets and songs with the highest number of different individual letters in the title. God the internet is amazing.
I think it's rather tragic that the Backstreet Boys are among that list. Although, I admit, I was a fan as a teenager.
ReplyDelete