Based solely on certified scales, Michael Jackson's Thriller remains the undisputed winner. In 1982, music was in a strange transitional period, with Disco and Funk on their way out and Rock and Pop on their way in. By combining all four genres, Michael created the best-selling record of all time.

The music videos for this album are regarded as having elevated videos to the status of an art form. The music videos for "Thriller", "Billie Jean", and "Beat It", as well as the album's seven hits, drove sales for a long time. Without a doubt, this is one of the most important albums ever made. The album Thriller by Michael Jackson was the first to reach the top of the Billboard 200 chart, which was then known as the Billboard Top LPs & Tapes chart. It was number one for 37 weeks. It was certified 33 times platinum and won an unprecedented eight Grammy Awards at the 1984 Grammy Awards.

From 1971 to 1975, The Eagles' Greatest Hits contains all of their Country Rock, Folk Rock, and Soft Rock hits. It was released in 1976 and has since grown in popularity as an oldies music collection. According to the label, they discovered ancient sales records, bringing their total sales to millions of dollars.

The Michael Jackson Estate fought this claim because the auditing window only goes back three years, but The Eagles got around that limitation. The drama in the music industry is entertaining! None of the band members were involved in the release, which they saw as a ruse by the record company to generate more money without incurring additional costs. This set includes singles from the Eagles' first four studio albums. Boyd Elder used a plastic cast of a genuine eagle skull to create the album cover. He was paid $5,000 for his efforts (too bad he got no royalties).

Back in Black was released in 1980, at the height of the Hard Rock era, and was AC/seventh DC's studio album and the first with new vocalist Brian Johnson. Both the name and the cover were intended to be mourning symbols at the time. The album was supported by a yearlong world tour, which resulted in its ultimate 25x Platinum certification.

After the songs were written, rehearsals lasted one week, followed by seven weeks of recording, and the rest is history. The album was certified 22x Multi-Platinum in the United States alone in 2007. It's considered one of the best arena rock albums of all time, as well as a "high watermark" for heavy metal music. It's ten tracks of high-energy music that are still popular today. The album was recorded in a low-cost studio in Nassau, Bahamas, due to scheduling conflicts. A crab shuffle on the hardwood floor once interrupted the recordings.

Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon, released in 1973, is a critically acclaimed Progressive Rock album. It had been a long time coming, being their eighth studio album. It's a concept CD that uses a variety of experimental techniques to create previously unseen sounds. The number of remasters and re-releases has contributed to the sales increase. It received near-universal acclaim from all critics and continues to do so retroactively. The band's members are among the wealthiest musicians in the world, and the profits were used to fund the production of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Due to numerous artists continuing to release covers of the whole album, the record continues to sell roughly 10,000 copies every week.

This album debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 and stayed there for 950 weeks. A year before its premiere, it was given a live press screening at the Rainbow Theatre, and the audience was ecstatic. The original title was Dark Side of the Moon: A Piece for Assorted Lunatics. It was recorded at Abbey Road Studios.

Saturday Night Fever has one of the best movie soundtracks of all time. It was released in 1977 and is almost entirely composed of Bee Gees songs. The Bee Gees songs were used so extensively in the soundtrack and film that they effectively lost an album's worth of material.

This monster of an album went 16x Platinum, spent 24 weeks at the top of the Billboard 200, and was on the charts for a total of 120 weeks. The popularity of the album can be attributed to three factors: it is a double album, so sales are counted twice, the movie was fantastic, and the Bee Gees were at the pinnacle of their career at the time. The Library of Congress added this album to the National Recording Registry in 2013 because it is culturally significant. It won the Grammy for Album of the Year, as well as five other awards, including the Hall of Fame Award.

Bat Out of Hell was a 1977 Hard Rock and Glam Rock album. Some say it belongs to the Progressive Rock genre, which has a large fan base. This was Meat Loaf's first studio album, and it included his most popular single, "Two Out of Three Ain't Bad".

Bat Out of Hell was certified 14 times platinum and spent the second-longest time (522 weeks) on the UK Albums Chart. It was adapted into a musical of the same name in 2017. It's not one of the greatest musicals of all time, and it was even canceled during its initial run in the United States. Despite the fact that Jim wrote the majority of the material, the marketing team at the record label knew better. Max Weinberg played drums on the album.

Bad was released in 1987, at a time when rock was declining and Pop and R&B were on the rise. Michael Jackson successfully combined all of them, as well as his trademark Funk sound. It was followed by nine singles over the next two years, beginning with "I Just Can't Stop Loving You".

At the time, Bad was dubbed the most anticipated album in history, and it may still be. The Jackson 5 were on tour together for the first time since 1972. They broke the record by selling out Wembley Stadium on seven consecutive nights. During the trip, three Guinness World Records were set. Bad debuted at number one on the Billboard Top Pop Albums and Billboard 200 charts. It was promoted alongside Michael Jackson's film Moonwalker. It received six Grammy nominations and won several of them, as well as the Billboard Music Award for Album of the Year. Michael and Prince were supposed to duet on "Bad".

The untitled studio album by the English rock band Led Zeppelin, also known as Led Zeppelin IV, was released by Atlantic Records on November 8, 1971. It was recorded between December 1970 and February 1971, mostly at the country house Headley Grange, and was produced by guitarist Jimmy Page. The album is notable for including "Stairway to Heaven", which has been dubbed the band's "signature song".

The band was inspired by the relaxed atmosphere at Headley Grange, which allowed them to experiment with different arrangements of material and write songs in a variety of styles. After receiving lukewarm reviews for their previous album, Led Zeppelin III, the band decided that their fourth album would be untitled and represented instead by four symbols chosen by each band member, with no name or other details on the cover. The album was a commercial and critical success, and it remains Led Zeppelin's best-selling album, having sold over 37 million copies worldwide. It is one of the best-selling albums in the United States, and critics consistently rank it high on lists of the greatest albums of all time.

1 is a compilation album released on November 13, 2000, by the English rock band the Beatles. From 1962 to 1970, the band had nearly every number-one single in the United Kingdom or the United States. It was their first compilation, released on a single CD on the 30th anniversary of their breakup. 1 was a commercial success, topping charts all over the world. Over 31 million copies have been sold.

Since Nielsen SoundScan began tracking US album sales in January 1991, 1 has been the fourth best-selling album in the United States, the best-selling album of the 2000s decade in the United States, and the best-selling album of the decade globally. In September 2011, 1 was remastered and reissued. In November 2015, it was remixed and reissued in several different deluxe editions, the most comprehensive of which is a three-disc set titled 1+, which includes video discs of Beatles promotional films.

Metallica is American heavy metal band Metallica's fifth studio album. Elektra Records released it on August 12, 1991, and it is commonly referred to as The Black Album due to its packaging design. The album marked a departure from the band's previous four albums' thrash metal style in favor of a slower, heavier, and more refined sound. The song "Don't Tread on Me" was also released to rock radio shortly after the album's release, but it was never released as a commercial single.

Metallica received widespread acclaim and went on to become the band's best-selling album. It debuted at number one in ten countries and spent four weeks on top of the Billboard 200, making it Metallica's first album to do so. Metallica's album is one of the best-selling albums in the world, as well as one of the best-selling albums in the United States since Nielsen SoundScan began tracking. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) certified the album 16 platinum in 2012, and it has sold over sixteen million copies in the United States, making it the first album in the SoundScan era to do so.