What are the biggest selling 'Greatest Hits' compilation albums of the last 20 years and do you lament their passing?

Eagles must be the best selling ever along with Abba Gold and Queen Greatest Hits but what about the last 20 years? Spotify has more or less killed this phenomenon off so

What was the biggest selling 'Greatest Hits' albums of the past 20 years?

Beatles '1s'?

Erasure's Pop! series?

According to this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_albums_in_the_United_Kingdom

The only best-selling greatest hits LP in the 21st century in the UK is Take That's "Never Forget – The Ultimate Collection"

found a list of the biggest selling greatest hits albums in the UK
https://i.imgur.com/kwnL5aS.png

Biggest selling in the world is Whitney Houston's Greatest Hits from 2000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_albums_of_the_21st_century

Queen's Greatest Hits really annoys me because a) it's Queen, and b) the tracks are not in chronological order - something I consider essential for a greatest hits album.

Greatest hits albums being out of chronological order is a pet peeve of mine too.

Do you want DJ mixes in chronological order too?

I like chronological, but for "Greatest Hits" it should flow like a proper album.

Yes to flow.

I think chronological order only matters if you know the order to begin with -- and in that case you probably already have all the albums and don't need a greatest hits (there are many exceptions though).

I've always preferred chronological order myself for greatest hits

Weird how there's not more British 70s favourites in there; Rod, Elton, Macca..

Baffled as to why we were all buying Queen GH2 in such a high volume. I always think Abba More Gold would have been huge if the track list wasn't such an unholy mess.

Since Freddie died I think Queen GH 1 & 2 were sold together. (I believe its sold with 3 now too)

Do any of you still make Greatest Hits playlists or CDs? I spend way too much time working on song order in all the ones I've made lately but the end result is godly and makes me feel good.

What are some good non-chronological hits comps that "flow as well as DJ mixes"?

Do any of you still make Greatest Hits playlists or CDs?

I make them from time to time and am a strict chronological follower, especially for artists whose style changed over time.

Artists with large back catalogs benefit greatly from a well chosen 'Best Of', even better when they included guest appearances or one-off collaborations (cf. The Fall - A World Bewitched).

lots of great single-artist comps are not in chronological order. the Teenage Fanclub one for instance has great sequencing

Not sure how many examples of this exist but Roxy's last best of/GH starts with 'Avalon' and ends with 'Remake/Remodel'

Sounds like it was designed to annoy me.

important reference for the Olden Days: double album greatest hits: a celebration

Not sure how many examples of this exist but Roxy's last best of/GH starts with 'Avalon' and ends with 'Remake/Remodel'

Bowie's Nothing Has Changed compilation does this too, I think it works really well when an artist's career covers multiple decades.

lol I came here to post the Roxy Music one! I'm ordinarily a chronological order guy, but this works in a weird way, because it starts out languid and dreamy and then gets steadily more wound up and frantic.

was gonna say the next day is terrific!

Not sure if exactly reverse chronological order is better or worse than complete jumbles. ABBA Gold is the canonical answer to a non-chrono comp that works well, but in general I hate it. The 2CD Story of the Clash has tracks from 1979-1982 on its first disc, and tracks from 1977-1979 on the second disc, but non-chronological sequencing on each of the discs, and most maddeningly tracks fromLondon Calling are split between the two. I recall my anal-retentive 16-year-old self loading both into the CD changer and spending ridiculous amounts of time programming them into chrono order.

My vote for best single cd greatest hits goes to All This and Nothing by The Psychedelic Furs. Perfectly sequenced in a semi-chronological manner, it's one monster after another. And the new single they recorded for it, All That Money Wants, could be their best song.

That's a great one - it's also a single vinyl LP, a long one at 64 minutes.

Ah no, that has two songs fewer.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/1e/Outkast-big-boi-and-dre-present.jpg

Big Boi and Dre Present... OutKast was a really cool, platinum-selling stocking-stuffer in December 2001. It was more or less as a cash-in on the success of "Mrs. Jackson," but I think it helped clue a lot of new fans into their longer history. It's also one of those where two years later they released another album with several more hits - which turned out to be their last hits - so if they'd waited, they could have had an absolutely incredible double-disc set after that album.

Reminds me that one of my first ILM threads was this one: Whose Greatest Hits Would You Like To See? which reminds me how quickly the scene changed to where it wouldn't occur to me to need to own a greatest hits by someone where I like a reasonable handful of singles, but don't feel a strong need to own an album. They can just end up in some Spotify playlist. Kind of a bummer considering how much the "slab of great singles" comps helped shape my own musical passions at an early age. Also this has to be bad news for artists from that era and forward, who can't count on these kinds of catalog sellers the way even an average 80s act can.

i loved Greatest Hits albums as a kid but not really since except for genres that aren't album oriented

Bjork's 2002 Greatest hits is a good example of a non-chronological which works really well, also it doesn't include her biggest-selling single

1. "All Is Full of Love" (Video Version; from Homogenic, 1997)
2. "Hyperballad" (from Post, 1995)
3. "Human Behaviour" (from Debut, 1993)
4. "Jóga" (from Homogenic, 1997)
5. "Bachelorette" (from Homogenic, 1997)
6. "Army of Me" (from Post, 1995)
7. "Pagan Poetry" (from Vespertine, 2001)
8. "Big Time Sensuality" (The Fluke Minimix Video Version; from Debut, 1993)
9. "Venus as a Boy" (from Debut, 1993)
10. "Hunter" (from Homogenic, 1997)
11. "Hidden Place" (from Vespertine, 2001)
12. "Isobel" (from Post, 1995)
13. "Possibly Maybe" (from Post, 1995)
14. "Play Dead" (from The Young Americans soundtrack, 1993)
15. "It's in Our Hands" (new track)

In contrast, the "fan-chosen" "greatest hits" version on Family Tree, many of which weren't even singles, and which IS presented chronologically ...

1. "Venus as a Boy" (from Debut, 1993)
2. "Hyperballad" (from Post, 1995)
3. "You've Been Flirting Again" (from Post, 1995) [not a single]
4. "Isobel" (from Post, 1995)
5. "Jóga" (from Homogenic, 1997)
6. "Unravel" (from Homogenic, 1997) [not a single]
7. "Bachelorette" (from Homogenic, 1997)
8. "All Is Full of Love" (from Homogenic, 1997)
9. "Scatterheart" (from Selmasongs, 2000) [not a single]
10. "I've Seen It All" (from Selmasongs, 2000) [not a single]
11. "Pagan Poetry" (from Selmasongs, 2000)
12. "It's Not Up to You" (from Selmasongs, 2000) [not a single]

oops, last two obv from Vespertine (2001)

i think a jimmy eat world greatest hits would be dynamite, idk if they'll ever put one out

i also love several full-length killers albums but they are well-served by their hits collection

I always liked how Absolute Classic Masterpieces by Felt and the Lush best of are in reverse chronological order, are there any other greatest hits that do that?

(in the those two cases it means that record starts off with the more poppy stuff and gets increasingly ethereal and gauzy)

The first two discs of Rickie Lee Jones' Rhino anthology have the tracks programmed in ABC order.

this is just sort of just re-explicating the "singles artist" concept, but: seems to me the GH really comes into focus when an artist has a huge discography with a few hits per album and also an obvious sense that lots of the albums are about halfway dross or fans-only deep cuts. they're so good for second- and third-tier acts of the 60s and 70s when albums were cranked out annually or twice annually and you just know you wouldn't improve your life by owning six herman's hermits LPs. even a top-drawer act like the stones has so many more albums than your average classic rock radio listener/shopper on a budget needed. billy joel, with all those dubious second sides of LPs that we discovered in the listening thread, also comes to mind, and his first comp was a monster seller.

as acts put out fewer albums in the post-thriller era, the gap between buying a two-disc comp and a four-disc discography (or just the two biggest albums, and so-it-goes for the minor singles on the others) shrank. some of the biggest 90s acts put out like three albums in the whole decade that had any hits on them to speak of.

Full disclosure: I recently purchased the single disc Billy Joel comp. On CD no less. At least with online purchases you don’t have to face the snide eye rolls of the record store clerk.

I picture a teen with air-pods walking past the record store rolling his eyes at everyone inside

More than half of ilx probably doesn't buy physical media anymore either

I picked up an old cassette of Tears for Fears' Tears Roll Down recently and was surprised, given that it drew from only three rather different albums (plus one new song) that it actually worked pretty well as an album, arranged non-chronologically and setting the songs into sharp relief (e.g., "Mothers Talk" into "Change" with no gap between them).

Tears Roll Down is always what I end up listening to when I want to listen to Tears for Fears.

I get that the rise of streaming services has caused the end of greatest hits albums, but I actually listen to a bunch of greatest hits albums on spotify. They tend to be better than just playing the most popular songs or artist playlists.

What are some good non-chronological hits comps that "flow as well as DJ mixes"?

The Jean-Michel Jarre comps are all pretty good with this, especially since Jarre usually remixes and edits stuff to flow better. The 2004 album Aero re-records everything, I think.

I also think the 2-disc Kink Kronikles is particularly good with this, especially since half the tunes are singles and B-sides that are just as good as the album cuts. That said it only spans like a 4 year period so of course it's going to flow well.

The Beastie Boys Sounds of Science is also quite good, though IDK if you'd really call it a "greatest hits" album...sure, all the hits are there, but it's full of a lot of weird rare tracks and bizarre stuff from the albums, as if the point was to make as diverse a compilation as possible. The idea was to oscillate wildly from one style to the next. It wouldn't have worked if everything was just in order.

That's also got the greatest booklet i ever did see in a compilation, a proper long read full of great pictures and such.

The Bowie comp I can only assume is in reverse chronological order as they wanted to represent their earliest material which would be too confusing to open with

did a cursory search of the riaa database for the usa -- it seems among the biggest of the past couple decades here are...

The Beatles - 1 (2000) (11m certified units)
Eminem - Curtain Call: The Hits (2005) (7m)
Tim McGraw - Greatest Hits (2000) (6m)
Elvis Presley - Elvis: 30 #1 Hits (2002) (6m)
Alan Jackson - Greatest Hits Volume II (2003) (6m)
Kenny Chesney - Greatest Hits (2000) (5m)
Guns 'N Roses - Greatest Hits (2004) (5m)
Martina McBride - Greatest Hits (2001) (4m)
Michael Jackson - Number Ones (2003) (4m)
Shania Twain - Greatest Hits (2004) (4m)

of course the most obvious thing to notice here is the high proportion of country artists. this makes sense to me given that country fans were big cd/retail buyers and most mainstream country acts are known primarily as 'singles artists'. also worth noting is that a large proportion of the mj comp's sales were racked up in 2009 following his death (it was one of the best-selling albums of that year).

there are some noteworthy multi-disc sets too. (riaa certifies these at a level corresponding to their units shipped times the number of discs in the cd issue.)...

Elton John - Greatest Hits 1970-2002 (2002) (2-disc set, 3m certified units)
Garth Brooks - The Ultimate Hits (2007) (3-disc set, ~3.3m) -- this one is actually certified diamond lol
Whitney Houston - Whitney: The Greatest Hits (2000) (2-disc set, 2.5m)

in any case, it seems the commercial relevance of these compilations basically died out as the oughts progressed. i don't think labels even bother to release them anymore for most mainstream acts. maybe some country acts still get to do it every now and again?

Shania Twain - Greatest Hits (2004) (4m)

This is probably the last “greatest hits” comp I bought (at the time of release). It’s a gr8 one...

the Outkast one is a great example. it was my introduction to the band.

Green Day's International Superhits!, released in November 2001, was a somewhat similar situation: really great career overview of a band even I thought was over the hill. it's sort of been forgotten since American Idiot came out three years later. Such a great GH, though. That's my pick.

Generally the only mainstream comps that are released today are budget sets you find in the $5 bin at Walmart.

That said, Green Day did a new comp in 2017, but instead of making it a 'Pt. 2', it was half stuff from the first one and the rest a catch-all of the subsequent catalogue.

the Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers Greatest Hits comp has gotta be up there too, it went 12x platinum. And it’s still the most crucial compilation CD of my life in terms of introducing me to an artist and leading me to their studio albums while remaining an essential and perfectly compiled album itself that I’m happy to keep stashed in my glove compartment for frequent listening.

Double platinum in the UK and one of the best Greatest Hits ever imo:
https://img.discogs.com/ct-Rt6tCrZeLZxvroi89_Ps4akg=/fit-in/300x300/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(40)/discogs-images/R-424863-1279556679.jpeg.jpg

Particularly with the second cd.

yeah a classic, great DVD too.

dyl, cheers for that info!