Metallica Still The Best

At the close of 2010, Metallica’s Metallica (the “Black Album”) remains the biggest selling album of the SoundScan era. The Metallica disc has sold 15,620,000 units since SoundScan began tracking sales in 1991. The album boasted...

...sales of 120,000 last year. Shania Twain’s Come on Over ranks second in sales during the era, with Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill holding the third spot.

Nielsen’s SoundScan further reports that U.S. album sales, in total, decreased by 12.7 percent in 2010, a slump that matches the drop in sales that occurred in 2009. Americans purchased 326,200,000 albums in 2010. That figure includes both physical and digital releases. Digital album downloads actually increased by 13 percent last year, accounting for roughly a quarter of all album sales.

The Top 10 selling albums of the SoundScan era are:

1. Metallica - Metallica (15,620,000)
2. Shania Twain - Come On Over (15,487,000)
3. Alanis Morissette - Jagged Little Pill (14,642,000)
4. Backstreet Boys - Millennium (12,109,000)
5. Various artists – The Bodyguard soundtrack (11,815,000)
6. Santana - Supernatural (11,687,000)
7. The Beatles - 1 (11,584,000)
8. Creed - Human Clay (11,547,000)
9. N Sync - No Strings Attached (11,113,000)
10. Celine Dion - Falling Into You (10,781,000)

Full story from gibson.com here.