Representing different musical styles, demographics and personality types, Beyonce, Eric Church and Lorde are the acts responsible for 2014’s best-selling solo albums.
Beyonce’s “Beyonce” leads the way among soloist album releases with 702,000 sales in the first half of 2014, while Eric Church’s “The Outsiders” and Lorde’s “Pure Heroine” follow with 642,000 and 641,000, respectively.
Of the three, only the Eric Church album was actually released in 2014.
According to ChartWatch, the three releases join the behemoth “Frozen” soundtrack (2,696,000) and Coldplay’s “Ghost Stories” (589,000) in the list of just five albums that sold more than a half million copies in the first half of 2014.
A new low for the Nielsen SoundScan era, that number is less than half that of the previous low, which came when only eleven albums achieved the feat in 2012.