I saw a story at the Examiner website which gave the sales figures for the remastered CDs from their release on 9th September through to 6th December - a period of just under three months.
The figures come from SoundScan, so I assume they are just for the US (the original article doesn't say).
Here's the list, in order of sales ....
1 Abbey Road 272,220
2 Sgt Peppers 211,856
3 The Beatles (White Album) 203,452
4 Rubber Soul 160,642
5 Revolver 138,380
6 Past Masters 111,184
7 Help! 106,568
8 Let It Be 98,599
9 Magical Mystery Tour 96,081
10 A Hard Day's Night 93,245
11 Please Please Me 73,489
12 With The Beatles 67,405
13 Beatles For Sale 64,373
14 Yellow Submarine 46,460
The Beatles' stereo box set (16 CDs + DVD) 112,564
The Beatles in Mono' mono box set (13 CDs) 38,219
Some interesting figures there, I thought. For example .....
I was surprised to see that Abbey Road outsold Revolver almost two-to-one. I thought Revolver would have been one of the biggest sellers.
And A Hard Days Night only makes it to number 10 on the list.
The White Album is obviously a popular one - it made it to number 3 in the chart even though it is priced higher than the single CDs.
And ignoring YS - which is really only half a Beatles album - the most unpopular of the bunch is BFS.
The Beatles first four LPs are at the bottom of the list (again ignoring YS). The early period is obviously not that popular with record buyers.
I was also surprised at how high up the list Let It Be is (especially given that Let It Be ... Naked was not released all that long ago).
And the pre-release rumours which suggested that the mono box was limited to 10,000 units were obviously wrong, since it sold almost four times that number!!
What are your thoughts on the figures? Are there any that have surprised you?