Pink Floyd: “The Dark Side Of The Moon” is closing in on a historic record: a thousand weeks on the Billboard 200 chart

“The Dark Side Of The Moon” by Pink Floyd is closing in on a historic milestone: a thousand total weeks on the Billboard 200 chart. The album, released in 1973 and still the record holder for the longest run on the American chart, tallies its 996th non-consecutive week in the survey dated January 10, dropping from position 114 to 167.

In terms of time, those 996 weeks add up to more than 229 months, or over nineteen years spent on the chart altogether. It's an unprecedented figure: the Billboard 200 has existed in its regular weekly form since March 1956, and “The Dark Side Of The Moon” has been the longest-charting album in the ranking's history since 1983, the year it definitively overtook every other title.

Released in 1973, the album reached number one for one week in April of that year and featured the first Pink Floyd single to enter the American singles chart, “Money”, which climbed as high as number 13 on the Billboard Hot 100. The decisive overtaking came in the week of October 29, 1983, when “The Dark Side Of The Moon” notched its 491st week on the chart, surpassing the record previously held by Johnny Mathis's “Johnny’s Greatest Hits”, which had stalled at 490.

Between its chart debut on March 17, 1973 and October 8, 1988, the album remained on the Billboard 200 almost without interruption: of 813 total weeks, it spent 741 of them inside the chart. After dropping off in October 1988, the record vanished from the chart until December 2009, when a rule change allowed catalog titles to re-enter the rankings. From 1991 until the end of 2009, in fact, the Billboard 200 was reserved almost exclusively for more recent releases.

Trailing “The Dark Side Of The Moon” on the list of longest-charting albums of all time – as Billboard notes – are “Legend: The Best Of Bob Marley And The Wailers” by Bob Marley And The Wailers, with 920 weeks, and Journey's “Journey’s Greatest Hits”, with 890. Both records, released in 1984 and 1988 respectively, benefited from returning to the chart starting in 2009 and have remained on it almost constantly ever since.

The overall picture has changed radically in recent years. Today the Billboard 200 measures album popularity in the United States through a system of “equivalent units”, combining physical sales, track downloads and streaming data collected by Luminate. The introduction of streaming into the calculation, in December 2014, has favored greater chart longevity, especially for albums packed with iconic tracks or for compilations. Against this backdrop, the staying power of “The Dark Side Of The Moon” remains a unique case: a record capable of spanning five decades of transformation in the music industry without ever losing its centrality.

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