Ongoing History Daily: The biggest-selling artist of 2016 was…Mozart? Sort of.
The recorded music industry went through tremendous upheavals during the first 15 years of the 15th as the world moved away from primarily selling CDs and into digital downloads and then streaming. This led to an odd situation in 2016 where the biggest-selling artist when it came to raw numbers of CDs had been dead since 1791.
That year, Universal Music Group released a box set commemorating the 225th anniversary of the composer’s death. Each box contained 200 CDs. Under the sales rules in place at the time, each of those discs was counted as a separate sale.
The entire inventory of those box sets was sold immediately. That was enough to make Mozart the biggest-selling artist on CD in 2016.
