Interesting feature from Yahoo! Music detailing the top new album-selling acts since 2000. Plenty of updated career totals.

 

 

US album sales

 

Total sales of the top 20 artists are as of November 26 2014. 'Best seller' sales and those of #21-#27 are as of June 23 2014 except where otherwise indicated.

 

1. Taylor Swift: 25,200,000 - since October 2006

• Best seller: 'Fearless' (6,900,000 - November 2014)
• July 2014 updated sales of Taylor's discography here

2. Linkin Park: 25,000,000 - since October 2000

• Best seller: 'Hybrid Theory' (10,222,000)

3. Nickelback: 23,200,000 - since March 2000

• Best seller: 'All the Right Reasons' (7,836,000)

4. Rascal Flatts: 22,900,000- since June 2000

• Best seller: 'Feels Like Today' (5,274,000)

5. Josh Groban: 22,315,000 - since November 2001

• Best seller: 'Closer' (6,033,000)

6. Nelly: 21,817,000 - since June 2000

• Best seller: 'Country Grammar' (8,561,000)

7. Norah Jones: 19,100,000 - since February 2002

• Best seller: 'Come Away With Me' (11,005,000)

8. Alicia Keys: 18,400,000 - since June 2001

• Best seller: 'Songs in A Minor' (6,348,000)

9. Michael Bublé: 18,100,000 - since February 2003

• Best seller: 'It's Time' (3,790,000)

10. Coldplay: 18,100,000 - since November 2000

• Best seller: 'A Rush of Blood to the Head' (4,925,000)

11. 50 Cent: 16,900,000 - since May 2002

• Best seller: 'Get Rich Or Die Tryin'' (8,273,000)

12. P!nk: 16,200,000 - since April 2000

• Best seller: 'Missundaztood' (5,628,000)

13. Beyoncé: 15,500,000 - since June 2003

• Best seller: 'Dangerously in Love' (4,924,000)

14. John Mayer: 14,900,000 - since June 2001

• Best seller: 'Room for Squares' (4,484,000)

15. Carrie Underwood: 14,700,000 - since November 2005

• Best seller: 'Some Hearts' (7,393,000)

16. Ludacris: 14,300,000 - since May 2000

• Best seller: 'Word of Mouf' (3,674,000)

17. Adele: 13,800,000 - since March 2008

• Best seller: '21' (11,020,000 - November 2014)

18. Kelly Clarkson: 13,500,000 - since April 2003

• Best seller: 'Breakaway' (6,307,000)

19. 3 Doors Down: 13,400,000 - since February 2000

• Best seller: 'The Better Life' (5,653,000)

20. Kanye West: 12,900,000 - since February 2004

• Best seller: 'The College Dropout' (3,358,000)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

21. Avril Lavigne: 12,305,000

• Best seller: 'Let Go' (6,841,000 - July 2013)
• July 2013 updated sales of Avril's discography here

22. Justin Timberlake: 11,993,000

• Best seller: 'FutureSex/LoveSounds' (4,400,000 - March 2013)

23. Maroon 5: 11,576,000

• Best seller: 'Songs About Jane' (5,149,000)
• June 2014 updated sales of Maroon 5's discography here

24. Jack Johnson: 11,432,000

• Best seller: 'In Between Dreams' (3,292,000 - Aug 2013)

25. Evanescence: 11,257,000

• Best seller: 'Fallen' (7,600,000 - Oct 2011)

26. Justin Bieber: 10,630,000

• Best seller: 'My World 2.0' (3,265,000 - March 2013)

27. Disturbed: 10,624,000

• Best seller: 'The Sickness' (4,322,000 - Feb 2013)

 

Edited November 27, 201410 yr by britster

Shocked to see P!nk above Beyonce, and overall Beyonce that low. :o

Nelly: 21,817,000

• Best-seller: 'Country Grammar' (8,561,000)

50 Cent: 16,786,000

• Best-seller: 'Get Rich Or Die Tryin'' (8,273,000)

Ludacris: 14,274,000

• Best-seller: 'Word of Mouf' (3,674,000)

Kanye West: 12,805,000

• Best-seller: 'The College Dropout' (3,358,000)

Any surprises?

Surprised Jay-Z isn't on the list given his status, and REALLY surprised at Ludacris' sales :o

 

EDIT: just re-read your post and its NEW acts since 2000, so Jay-Z wouldn't be there :lol:

 

 

Some of these people I have genuinely never heard of - should I know 3 Doors Down, John Mayer? It is interesting that while the UK often takes to the less popular American acts, they ignore some of the very biggest (though obviously genre comes into account here).

 

Take for example, Miranda Lambert. She must be one of the best selling artists of this century worldwide, yet nobody here outside the internet knows her name. And there's the two people I've listed above, Josh Groban, "Rascal Flatts" (?) and so on. All this while international successes like Ke$ha get no mention.

 

When you see acts like Taylor so high you really realise how important consistency is. She never had a 21 but 4 big albums and you've got 20+ million sales already. Pretty amazing.

 

 

GROSSS at that OFFENCE against MUSAK!!!

 

Also GROSS at ADELE selling SO LOW!!!

 

And LOL at Linkin Park bein no.1! :lol:

 

BAd music taste called or what! :lol:

GROSSS at that OFFENCE against MUSAK!!!

 

Also GROSS at ADELE selling SO LOW!!!

 

And LOL at Linkin Park bein no.1! :lol:

 

BAd music taste called or what! :lol:

Jealous that Pink has outsold Gaga? :teresa:

Jealous that Pink has outsold Gaga? :teresa:

 

Radical Pink Trolls trollin us by buying that BAD 'MUSIC'!!!!

Some more numbers to add to this:

 

Justin Bieber: 10,630,000

Evanescence: 11,257,000

Maroon 5: 11,576,000

Justin Timberlake: 11,993,000

Avril Lavigne: 12,305,000

 

Pretty crazy to see Bieber competing with Timberlake already, although Biebs did have that huge début and the many many re-releases and cash-ins and EPs and what have you. I imagine he was actually ahead of JT until last year, too.

^ Great, thanks. Where did you get those figures?

A vaguely useful twitter account.

 

I'm gonna try and find a use for these figures, indeed. The only problem is that as much as they're up to date now, with the availability of US album sales not being very reliable anymore (we used to get the full top 200 sales every month at least), it's impossible to keep them updated. And we don't have a vidcapper for the US. But I'll think of something :D And the updated figures for the specific albums are nice at least.

Oh right, yeah that account is great. That's where I first found the figures. Did some further research and it turns out Paul Grein/Yahoo! added to the original Top 20 list with the next seven artists, which is where @chartnews would have taken those from. Will update the OP now.

 

And yeah, I was thinking that after a while we could update acts (like Coldplay) that currently have an album charting, the sales of which shouldn't be hard to get so at least their career totals would be semi-accurate. The figures are good to have as a reference anyway as it's been a long time since Billboard has provided totals for some of those big selling albums.

Edited June 26, 201411 yr by Noahspike

Some of these people I have genuinely never heard of - should I know 3 Doors Down, John Mayer? It is interesting that while the UK often takes to the less popular American acts, they ignore some of the very biggest (though obviously genre comes into account here).

 

Take for example, Miranda Lambert. She must be one of the best selling artists of this century worldwide, yet nobody here outside the internet knows her name. And there's the two people I've listed above, Josh Groban, "Rascal Flatts" (?) and so on. All this while international successes like Ke$ha get no mention.

 

When you see acts like Taylor so high you really realise how important consistency is. She never had a 21 but 4 big albums and you've got 20+ million sales already. Pretty amazing.

Rascal Flatts just had a top-five album a month ago :lol:

 

I'm most surprised to see Disturbed on the list and selling that much! Never would've guessed them but metal's not my genre of choice anyhow.

And LOL at Linkin Park bein no.1! :lol:

BAd music taste called or what! :lol:

 

Taylor Swift would be # 1 very soon. :heart:

 

Updated the first post with a link to a Billboard article from yesterday detailing Taylor Swift's individual album sales (which add up to be 400k short of her career total as I believe that includes other live albums and video albums). It also lists sales for her 10 best-selling songs.

 

There's also links to similar articles regarding the discographies of Avril Lavigne (dated July 2013) and Maroon 5 (last month).

Edited July 9, 201411 yr by Noahspike

This is an interesting list but it is clearly skewed toward acts that had big hits in the early 2000s when people bought many, many more albums in general. Even the acts that still sell well today (e.g. Beyonce, Maroon 5) had their biggest selling albums released in the early 2000s. There are a few exceptions (Adele) but generally a HUGE album in 2001 was 10 million and a HUGE album today is 4 million. In my opinion, this makes it rather useless to compare "new artists since 2000."

 

That said, there are some surprises here. Timberlake is way lower than I would have expected, but then again he has only released three albums...

^ Well yeah I guess in the sense that relatively recently emerging big album sellers (Lady Gaga [not anymore though :kink:] , Katy Perry, Bruno Mars etc.) don't feature. I do think it's interesting though that Adele and Justin Bieber (!) are the only two artists on the list that debuted after the early/mid 2000s (2008 and 2010 respectively) so by and large it does compare like with like, within the list anyway.

How the hell did NELLY sell 8 million albums? :o

Only just looked at the Taylor totals (great find). Some of the stuff is quite surprising! For one thing, IKYWT outselling WANEGBT (WHY were her song titles so long at the start of that era...) so comfortably is surprising, it didn't have the 623k start of WANEGBT, nor the "woo first single" hype so it's very impressive. Not to mention that by the time that IKYWT was a single, the album had sold millions.

 

Also interesting is the competition between 'Mine' and 'Mean', the former really did do quite poorly! Was always an odd single though and I love 'Mean' so I'm glad it was so big.

 

I'm interested to see at what point her first week album sales will peak. Speak Now sold much less than Fearless, but had a bigger first week, and Red similarly sold a tad less than Speak Now but had a bigger first week. Can Red scraping past 4 million sustain another first week increase...?

Well IKYWT debuted with 416k itself as a promo single so I don't think it was *too* disadvantaged. :P It also had a peak sales week of 582k (possibly helped by giftcards?) so I don't find it too surprising, I think it's just a generally more popular/wider appealing song with it also topping airplay and seeing how it performed in the UK as well. Maybe other factors also came into play (the music video and goat related factors :heehee:).

 

Looking back "Mine" might not have been the strongest choice for the first single but most of my favourites from that album are superb album tracks rather than single material. "Mean" is overrated imo.

Updated the first post as Yahoo! Music did a feature on Taylor Swift overtaking Linkin Park to become the top selling new artist of the 2000s. The article gives updated rounded figures for the total album sales of the top 20 artists.

 

No changes to the previous order other than Taylor rising to the top (although Coldplay have got very close to overtaking Michael Bublé with the release of 'Ghost Stories', but with Christmas approaching he'll have no issue pulling away again!).