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Originally posted by OffTheWall
Nice! Just wondering where did you find the US album sales numbers posted in the OP? For example Number Ones sold 5,1 million l thought. And Off The Wall is 8x platinum not 11x. Dangerous is 7x platinum. Or are those numbers you posted shipments?
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Shipments technically count for certs in the US, but Epic haven't claimed them for some (Bad especially) while others weren't tracked properly so are ineligible for certs (Thriller, Off The Wall). The
Thriller US sales are from here. HIStory is a mess because the first disc was released separately under two different release names, so it's sales are particularly hard to gauge but somewhere close to 25M seems most likely.
For the total US estimates, the basis for them
were MJDangerous (don't let the fan username fool you, his tracking is better than virtually anyone out there for every act, not just MJ) but his breakdown estimates are from pre-2009 sources mostly, with some updates stuff in early 2010. Members of MJJC have connections to the MJ Estate and Sony and so get given shipped numbers there, but some of them are nuts (they really have Thriller at >100M which is impossible and Bad is 45M shipped for them, etc.). Bridging the difference these are the numbers that you come up with. Motown releases are entirely from MJDangerous, I don't know how he tracks them because that label never releases sales.
The problem is because MJ is such a mega artist from the 80s and 90s, his TOTAL record count gets bumped, whereas they don't allocate the new record sales to specific albums/singles so it's really hard to break it down.
Plus I can't list the run order of every MJ album or the OP would require serious scrolling 