When ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’ Ended Its Record Chart Run
Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon finally left Billboard's album chart in July 1988, 736 weeks after it debuted on the weekly Top 200 listing.
Decades after that record was set, it still hasn't been broken.
Pink Floyd's eighth album debuted on March 17, 1973 at No. 95 on the Billboard's Top 200 album chart. The LP eventually made it all the way to No. 1, where Pink Floyd stayed for one week. Before that, their highest-charting project was the previous year's Obscured by Clouds, which peaked at No. 46. The group was going through some changes at the time, and The Dark Side of the Moon proudly reflected them.
As their audience grew, so did this landmark album's stature. By the end of the decade, Pink Floyd scored two more No. 1 albums and a Top 3 LP. Through it all, The Dark Side of the Moon remained on the chart, moving up and down based on the band's popularity at the moment.
As the early '80s gave way to the mid-'80s and then entered the late-'80s, the now-legendary album was still on the chart, having gone multi-platinum years ago. In the middle of July 1988, The Dark Side of the Moon was perched near the bottom of the Top 200 in its 736th week. And then it quietly, after a long and prosperous run, fell off the chart.
But that wasn't the end of The Dark Side of the Moon. The album re-entered the Top 200 and stayed there for five more weeks, bringing the album's total tally to 741 weeks. But wait – that still isn't the end of the record's chart domination. With the addition of Billboard's Catalog Albums chart – which ranks older LPs that still manage to sell well each week – The Dark Side of the Moon managed to log another 15 years, bring its total to more than 1,500 weeks ... and counting.
The album's closest competition is Bob Marley's Legend – though, as Billboard notes, it's getting clobbered by Pink Floyd "by an almost 2-1 margin" in total chart weeks. The magazine also points out that The Dark Side of the Moon has sold around 40 million copies worldwide and still sells approximately 8,500 copies "on a slow week ... often outpac[ing] the low end of the Billboard 200."
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