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The best-selling album in the United Kingdom is ''Greatest Hits'', a compilation album by British band Queen that was first released in 1981. , it has sold more than 6 million copies, of which approximately 124,000 have been from downloads. Queen's second greatest hits album, ''Greatest Hits II'', has sold approximately 3.89 million copies since being released in 1991, and is the tenth biggest-selling album in the UK. Of the UK's top 40 best-selling albums, more than half are by British artists. Nine are by American artists, with the rest being from Ireland, Canada, Sweden and Jamaica. Five acts—The Beatles, Coldplay, Dido, Michael Jackson and Queen—feature on the chart with more than one album, with Jackson and Queen both featuring twice within the top ten.〔 The most-represented record label is Parlophone with five entries, while the decade that appears the most is the 2000s, with 14 of the entries having been released during that period, despite its "general background of declining sales and internet piracy".〔〔 According to the British organisation the Official Charts Company (OCC), an album is defined as being a type of music release that features more than four tracks and is longer than 25 minutes in duration. Sales of albums in the UK were first published on 28 July 1956 by the music magazine ''Record Mirror'', who compiled a weekly chart of the country's five biggest-selling records. ''Record Mirror'' first number one was ''Songs for Swingin' Lovers!'' by Frank Sinatra. Since then, three albums have gone on to sell more than five million copies each: ''Greatest Hits'' by Queen, ''Gold: Greatest Hits'' by ABBA and ''Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band'' by The Beatles. The top eight best-selling albums have each sold at least four million copies. Since 1994, sales of albums have been monitored by the OCC, who took over compiling the weekly UK Albums Chart. Sales certifications for albums are awarded by the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) for shipments, physical sales and downloads of albums, and, , streaming of album tracks. The BPI began awarding certifications soon after it was founded in April 1973. Initially, certifications were based on the revenue received by the album manufacturers – records that generated revenue of were awarded silver certification, £150,000 represented gold and £1 million was platinum.〔 Over the following six years, the thresholds for silver and gold certifications both grew twice – the threshold for platinum certification remained at £1 million. In January 1979, this method of certifying sales was abolished, and certifications were instead based on unit sales to retail outlets: sales of 60,000 were awarded silver, gold for 100,000 and platinum for 300,000.〔 Multi-platinum awards were introduced in February 1987;〔As an example, a 2× Platinum certification would reflect 2 × 300,000 = 600,000 sales.〕 digital downloads have been counted towards unit sales since 2004. Certifications for albums released before April 1973 were retroactively awarded in August 2013 for sales from 1994 onwards, giving ''Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band'' triple-platinum status. The highest-certified album is ''21'' by Adele, which has been awarded platinum certification 16 times, representing 4,800,000 units.〔 , sales of ''21'' are estimated by the OCC to be just over 4.75 million. ==Best-selling albums== Positions are as of February 2014;〔 Sales, where shown, are from the reference given, which may be at a different date, and cannot be used to infer changes in position. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「List of best-selling albums in the United Kingdom」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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