10 iconic albums turning 50 this year, ranked by how many copies they’ve sold

Fifty years ago, vinyl records were nearing the peak of their popularity — and 1976 produced some of music’s most enduring albums.

Whether they were immediate hits or had a slower crawl to fame, many of those albums are among the best-selling of all time, with artists continuing to benefit from their lasting success.

To measure that impact, Business Insider used certifications from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), whose Gold & Platinum database is one of the industry’s best-known measures of commercial success.

RIAA data places records into four categories: gold, platinum, multi-platinum, and diamond.

Gold albums have sold 500,000 units, platinum 1 million, and diamond 10 million, with multi-platinum representing each million between platinum and diamond.

The database is not a live sales tracker and requires an official audit request and fee from record labels to update, but it is a well-regarded metric for measuring an album’s financial achievement.

The definition of what constitutes a unit sold has evolved and now accounts for digital downloads, on-demand streaming, and video.

For this list, we ranked albums by RIAA-certified units sold.

Awards and broader cultural impact were considered when determining which albums made the list, but we excluded greatest-hits albums and live records.

Here are 10 of the most iconic albums from 1976, ranked by the number of units sold.