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The 25 Best-Selling Hip-Hop Albums of All Time
A look at the 25 best-selling hip-hop albums of all time, from diamond classics to multiplatinum rap landmarks.
Hip-hop has spent the last half-century turning records into landmarks. From the block-party era of DJ Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash and Kurtis Blow in the 1970s to the streaming age that has made music easier to access and harder to measure, rap has produced albums that changed the culture long before they were tallied by sales charts. Quality still gets debated in the usual ways, through verses, production, originality and influence, but commercial success has always carried its own weight. Moving units does not explain everything, yet in hip-hop, those numbers often map the genre’s growth just as clearly as the music itself.
That’s part of why the Recording Industry Association of America’s sales milestones still matter, even if they can never tell the whole story. Only around a dozen rap albums have earned diamond certification, a club that includes The Notorious B.I.G.’s Life After Death, the Brooklyn rapper’s double-disc statement that remains one of the format’s defining releases, and Tupac Shakur’s All Eyez on Me, the first double album of original material in hip-hop history. Others have pushed even further. OutKast’s Speakerboxxx/The Love Below and Eminem’s The Eminem Show have gone multi-diamond, while records like 50 Cent’s debut Get Rich or Die Tryin’ show how a multiplatinum run can still define an era even without that top-tier certification.
Cash Money Records/Republic Records/Young Money Entertainment/Bad Boy Records/Arista Records/Universal Records Motown Drake’s Views, Biggie’s Life After Death and Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter III album covers
Cash Money Records/Republic Records/Young Money Entertainment/Bad Boy Records/Arista Records/Universal Records Motown
Still, the digital era has made the meaning of sales a little murkier. Rap’s output now moves at a pace that would have been unthinkable a generation ago, and not every blockbuster is automatically the most important album in the room. Sales and impact don’t always line up neatly. Even so, the biggest-selling hip-hop albums remain a useful snapshot of how the genre has traveled from regional phenomenon to global industry. The list below counts U.S. numbers only, as calculated by the RIAA, not worldwide totals.
Here are the 25 best-selling hip-hop albums of all time.
