The best selling albums of the 2010s

All hail Adele

In my last few stories, I looked at critics’ and fans’ favorite albums of the 2010s and then combined the two to generate the definitive list of the best albums of the 2010s. Missing from those lists are mega-selling artists like Adele, Ed Sheeran, and streaming colossus Drake. In this story, I shift focus to sales.

In the information age, it is surprisingly hard to get good data on global music sales. That’s the result of geographic and format fragmentation. It is relatively easy to get sales data for the US market, but the two globally biggest selling artists of the decade are UK based. Then there is the challenge of combining physical sales (yes, that is still a thing), digital downloads (also still a thing, although more so earlier in the decade), and streaming.

For this story, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Guillaume Vieira and his team at Chartmasters. They may be even more obsessive than me when it comes to data analysis and the music industry. For over four years they have been assembling the jigsaw puzzle of sales data, artist by artist, format by format. I sourced the sales data for this story from their site. Sales figures are for album equivalents. That means that downloads and streams are weighted to give an equivalent number of physical album sales. The laborious process required to…