A simple empirical question, that the internet has so far utterly failed to answer: who’s stereo LP was the first million-seller? I do not know the answer, but I do know it has something to do with percussion. Teeming millions, it is in your hands.
Gold albums are technically 500,000 copies but the million-selling platinum designation wasn’t invented until 1876, way too late to matter.
The first RIAA-certified gold album was the Oklahoma movie soundtrack in 1958, but that wasn’t released in stereo until 1960.
Putting 1959 into the RIAA gold and platinum searchable database gives a plausible candidate in Henry Mancini’s Peter Gunn album. It was released in both mono and stereo versions so I don’t know whether that meets your criterion. Some of the other albums certified Gold that year may also be candidates. Ernie Ford’s Hymns album wasn’t re-released in stereo until 1962, though, so Mancini would have been the first.
And that’s 1976, of course. The Eagle’s Greatest Hits was the first Platinum album, if you care.
Hmm. it appears the RIAA will not be much help here. I know that it isn’t any of the above albums. Any suggestions of where else to research?
Probably Enoch Light’s Persuasive Percussion. This site calls it “The first stereo record to achieve mass sales.”
The RIAA did not certify it Gold until 5/8/68. So if that’s the answer, yell “Cite!”
Coming of age in the 1960s, I know that when I could finally scrape together enough money to buy LP’s instead of singles, that major labels released both stereo and monaural versions of the same recording until at least 1965-66. You may never be able to find which album sold at least 500,000 stereo copies.
The mono versions were a buck cheaper, as I recall.
It also holds the current title of best selling album of all time in the US at 28 million copies.
Can anyone find confirmation of the Enoch Light answer?
How about Dick Schory? Anybody got anything on him?
Persuasive Percussion was #1 on the Billboard album chart for 13 weeks. Dick Schory’s Percussion Pops Orchestra’s biggest hit LP was Music for Bang, Baaroom and Harp, which just failed to crack the Top Ten. I don’t think Schory’s a contender.
It looks as if it was, indeed, Dick Schory’s album that gets the title. Apparently, when they first started selling stereo albums, the only LP that would properly demonstrate them was Schory’s–naturally people bought copies of it so they could demonstrate their new system to friends. Before someone yells “cite,” a graduate student at the University of Kentucky wrote his thesis on it. The thesis is available to people that have access to a dissertation search engine, but since the one I have access to is through my school, I can’t link to it. Trust me. 