Best-Selling Catalog Album of the 00's

Just FYI, the Dark Side of the Moon thing was a crock.

I was a Billboard reporter for a few years-- that is, I was the buyer at a large record chain who reported our "numbers" to Billboard. They weren't actual hard sales figures: we simply would send Billboard a list each week of our "Top 200".

And Capitol made it clear that keeping DSOTM in the Top 200 was one of their top priorities (often more important to them than some new releases). And most weeks, since I really didn't have a computerized listing of our Top 200 selling titles (physical sales inventory in our warehouse actually tended to be tracked monthly), it wasn't a big deal to make sure that Floyd stayed on the list. But I knew reporters from other stores/chains who insisted on some quid pro quo for these, or any other reporting priorities.

SoundScan or no, I wouldn't be terribly surprised to find that things were much the same today. Among other things, country sales have always been seriously under-reported in Billboard (a lot of country product is moved through rack jobbers that don't report to Billboard); if I were to guess, I'd suspect that the real winner was probably some Garth Brooks album.