I’ll also mention that I do love The Wall (notably “Hey You”, “Run Like Hell” and “Comfortably Numb”), but no one remembers it being so popular that it’s allegedly the fourth biggest selling album of all time. This is why I believe that Dark Side has to have easily sold more copies (it was on the chart non-stop from 1973 until 1988 and there’s an urban legend that there’s a record pressing plant in Germany thats sole purpose is to produce copies of the album. I don’t know how long The Wall was on, but it sure didn’t sell as much, hence why I believe it only sold as half as many copies as it the RIAA does)

(And BTW, you actually underestimate Dark Side a bit — it doesn’t have “pretty good sales to this day,” it has insane weekly sales for a record that’s that old. A Billboard feature a couple of years ago about the album’s longevity pointed out that at certain points in recent years it’s sold as much as 10,000 copies a week. I mean, that’s better than the entire bottom half of a typical week’s Billboard album chart. Crazy. I may not like Floyd, but: damn, props.)

Re: Hootie — what’s most fun about the list above (both RIAA-corrupt and my revision) is how it throws together albums that have sold steadily over time with one- to two-year flashes in the pan. I’d say Hootie is just about the flashiest, whereas Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell is the tortoise–never rose higher than No. 14, but it sells a couple hundred thousand a year, like clockwork.

On a side note, it is truly depressing that Hootie & The Blowfish sold that many albums. What were we thinking?

@Elijah-M: Good point. Not sure how the RIAA squares pre- and post-’87 sales of albums with the same title, like Rubber Soul and Revolver; I’ll bet they pool them all, if they differ by four or fewer tracks. Whereas I bet the vastly different Hard Day’s Night and Help! soundtracks are tracked differently. That’s just an educated guess on my part, however.

What if I only like Billy Joel’s career in the ’70s and don’t want his ’80s hits? Can I buy Greatest Hits, Volume I? Nope, not an option. Your choices are $20-plus for the double-set, or nothing.

How do we count sales of the Stones’ Exile on Main Street or Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, now that they’re each sold as single discs? For that matter, why weren’t the Beatles’ “red” and “blue” greatest-hits sets, each about an hour in length, reissued as single CDs by Capitol in the early ’90s? Answer: greed on EMI’s part, and the two-CD releases kept the album in double-certification zone for RIAA tallying purposes. You can see the result above–notice that both of those Beatles sets makes the all-time list, and other albums that have been reissued as singles don’t. Not evil, just…suspicious.

Bottom line, the RIAA system might conform with pricing in most cases, but it just doesn’t conform with the reality of the way albums are purchased.