Metallica, Rolling Stones and Tom Petty Top 2017 Best-Selling Rock Album Charts
The sales for the year have been tallied up, and Metallica's back on top of the rock 'n' roll heap.
Billboard's annual sales tally, which covers copies sold between Dec. 3, 2016 and Nov. 25 of this year, has been published — and Metallica's most recent album, Hardwired ... to Self-Destruct, racked up the biggest numbers. Certified platinum earlier this year, the group's 10th studio set outpaced new releases from a long list of rock acts who resurfaced this year, from veterans like Linkin Park to newer artists such as twenty one pilots.
Metallica weren't the only classic rock act to break into Billboard's year-end top 100 with a new album, either. The Rolling Stones, returning from a long layoff with their first full-length studio release in over a decade, placed ninth with Blue & Lonesome, the blues covers project that may have sparked a new LP of original material.
Elsewhere on the list, rock records of a variety of vintages sold enough to earn a spot on the 2017 tally. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers' 1993 greatest-hits package peaked at No. 2 upon its initial arrival and has gone on to sell more than 12 million copies over the nearly quarter of a century since then. It's still moving plenty of units, as evidenced by a No. 10 placement on this list. Similarly, Journey's 1988 Greatest Hits LP — a 15-million seller over the last several decades — came in a spot below Petty's compilation, landing at No. 11.
All in all, however, it was still Metallica's year — and Hardwired wasn't even the only one of the band's records to make this list. Their 1991 self-titled effort, commonly referred to as "the black album," has sold more than 16 million copies since its initial release, and people are still buying it: Metallica landed at No. 16 on the chart.