Most Popular Albums of 2022

• Posted on 1 January 2023
• By Pop Music
• Posted in Best of 2022, Most Popular Albums
• 0

2022 was soundtracked by the return of some major players in the music industry. Fans couldn't wait to hear new music from Taylor Swift, Harry Styles, Arcade Fire, Arctic Monkeys and Beyonce.

2022 was soundtracked by the return of some major players in the music industry. Fans couldn't wait to hear new music from Taylor Swift, Harry Styles, Arcade Fire, Arctic Monkeys and Beyonce. It's no surprise that all of these artists made a big impact to our Top 10 best-selling albums.

Taylor, Taylor, Taylor, Taylor, yes all four versions of Midnights combined gave our anti-hero the top spot of our year end chart. Everyone's boy crush Harry Styles also had double hit with the original release of Harry's House in May, followed by an exclusive yellow vinyl edition in July. Queen Madge though, still cracked the Top 3 with her remix album Finally Enough Love, featuring classic mixes of her biggest singles. There was also major POPSTARS support for new artists like Wet Leg, Lady Blackbird, The Smile and staff favourite, King Hannah.

In 2021, our most uttered phrase was "it's on backorder" - a term we had to explain over and over again as fans just didn't understand how backlogged vinyl production was worldwide. So many essentials albums, nowhere to be found. Thankfully in 2022, most of the major record companies managed to get many of these 'must-own' albums pressed again. Not everything we needed unfortunately, but much of the backorder challenges seemed to improve this past year. As always, we recommend fans to sign up for restock alerts on out-of-stock items. There's optimism that 2023 will be even better for back catalog fill.

Fans bought close to 22,000 albums from us in 2022, making these year-end charts always a fun thing to pull together. Our 'Top 22 of 22' would look a little different, had there been more copies available of certain albums during the holiday season, but that's what our supply chain is like right now. "You can't sell, what you don't have", as one record exec joked to us recently. These charts very much reflect what inventory was available from the distributor for most of the year. We'd love to make these charts a bit longer to show you more of what fans bought, but we can't give away all our secrets now can we?

Did your favourite albums from 2022 make our Top 22? Tell us in the comments.