Top Album Sales is a music chart published by Billboard magazine starting in May 1991,[1] and has existed in its current form since December 2014. It is a weekly chart documenting the best-selling albums on a weekly basis in the United States. Up until December 2014, this had been documented by the Billboard 200 chart, but that chart was altered to factor in music streaming by accounting for album-equivalent units in its tallies to document the effect of the rise of music streaming outlets such as Apple Music and Spotify. Starting in the Top Album Sales chart's debut week of May 25, 1991, Billboard began tabulating charts with electronically monitored piece count information from Soundscan, now known as Luminate.[1] During the week of December 6, 2014, the chart switched to a methodology that blends album sales with track equivalent album units and streaming equivalent album units.[1] The Top Album Sales chart was created to preserve the older methodology of counting pure album sales.[2][3][4][5]
In December 2023, Taylor Swift became the first act to simultaneously occupy the top 4 positions of the chart.[6] In January 2024, Swift also became the first act to simultaneously occupy 7 of the top 10 positions.[7]
| Issue date | Album | Artist(s) | Pure sales | Ref. |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| December 13 | 1989 | Taylor Swift | 281,000 | [8][9] |
| December 20 | 230,000 | [10][11] | ||
| December 27 | 2014 Forest Hills Drive | J. Cole | 353,000 | [12][13] |