Who was the best-selling artist in 1972?

Posted On April 15, 2025April 15, 2025

The 1970s were a decade in which the music industry gave Hollywood a run for its money in pop cultural rule. Following the psychedelic wresting away from the need to pump out a single every three months toward the conceptual primacy of the long player, the major labels suddenly saw a reliable investment in leaving the band to it in the studio to realise their big-budget opus.

The blockbuster record dominated the decade—Rumours‘ soap-opera folk rock from Fleetwood Mac or Meat Loaf’s Wagnerian teen Broadway drama Bat out of Hell smashing the Billboard with the same force as Jaws or Star Wars had the Box Office.

While the monster albums would commercially define the decade midway before punk had made its insurrectionary impact, the album’s creative ‘golden age’ would peak early in the decade. Progressive rock owed its very existence to the newly expanded peripheries of the LP medium for better or worse—Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon selling 50,000,000 copies and Yes foreshadowing prog’s demise with the triple-LP bore Tales from Topographic Oceans.

The Rolling Stones were closing their album purple patch with Exile on Main Street, and The Kinks had abandoned their pithy baroque pop pieces in favour of grand narrative vaudeville. Even R&B and soul had caught up with the cohesive appeal of the album—Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On became arguably Motown’s first concept LP surrounded by George Clinton’s lysergic-soaked funk.

The top 20 of the biggest-selling artists of 1972 offer little surprises. Yes, The Rolling Stones, Black Sabbath, Aretha Franklin, and Neil Diamond all found themselves in well over a million households that year, and in the top five, The Carpenters, Bread, David Bowie, and Neil Young all making big bucks—the latter’s country-tinged Harvest selling well over 8million and still standing as his most commercially successful album. None come close to that year’s Billboard topper, however, boasting an extra 10m ahead of Young’s silver medal.

So, who was the best-selling artist in 1972?

Released in June, Simon & Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits sold nearly 19million before the year was out. While tensions brought the duo to a close two years earlier, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel had begun the decade on a critical high, 1970’s Bridge over Troubled Water boasting some of the pair’s most loved compositions and winning six Grammy Awards, including ‘Record of the Year’. Just as doubts crept in as to any follow-up, their best-of package was dropped at just the right time to feed their fanbase’s forlorn pang for the next slice of Simon and Garfunkel, as well as gifting middle-America the perfect packaged introduction to their acclaimed folk harmonies.

Even for the purists, Simon & Garfunkel’s Greatest had plenty to offer. Mixing original studio recordings, single mixes and four previously unreleased live cuts, their acclaimed 1969 performances in St Louis and Vermont were finally made officially available.

It started a trend. Eagles’ Their Greatest Hits (1971–1975) released in 1976 would become a monster seller in its own right along with Hotel California, later followed by Queen and Bob Marley—posthumously in Marley’s case—releasing greatest hits compilations that would break records.

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