AC/DC Rock RIAA Figures

A month into 2001 and the usual group of teens running the record sales show were nowhere to be found, as hard rockers AC/DC were the ones making record sales news. The Recording Industry Association of America has recently upgraded fourteen of AC/DC's releases, increasing their cumulative sales from 46.5 million to 63 million. This makes the Aussie band the fifth-best-selling band in U.S. music history, behind the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and the Eagles. While several of the band's albums received a boost in sales, the band's 1980 classic Back in Black is now certified at nineteen million, up from sixteen, the sixth highest certified album of all time.

In other January certification news, with Ken Burns' documentary Jazz airing on PBS, the accompanying CD, Ken Burns Jazz: The Story of American Music, went gold this month (sales of 500,000). And late jazz great John Coltrane scored his first gold record with A Love Supreme, more than thirty-five years after its release.

Other artists receiving certifications this month include Rage Against the Machine, whose covers album, Renegades, went platinum (sales of one million), as did Xzibit's Restless and Linkin Park's Hybrid Theory. Meanwhile, the red-hot rockers Crazy Town's debut, The Gift of Game, went gold.

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Song Stories

“Help Me”

Joni Mitchell | 1974

Joni Mitchell wrote and recorded this song for her album Court and Spark, but she had to switch from her regular band to make the song sound exactly the way she wanted. "I had attempted to play my music with rock & roll players," she told Rolling Stone. "They’d laugh, 'Awww, isn't that cute? She's trying to teach us how to play.'" Mitchell switched to a jazz band, Tom Scott’s L.A. Express, and scored the biggest hit of her career in the process.

More Song Stories entries »

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