ARASHI Awarded Global Album of 2019 for Their 20th Anniversary Compilation 5x20 All the BEST!

19 March 2020 - Press release

 IFPI, the organisation that represents the recorded music industry worldwide, has announced that Japanese band ARASHI had the biggest global album of 2019, with their compilation 5x20 All the BEST!! 1999-2019. 

ARASHI – Satoshi Ohno, Sho Sakurai, Masaki Aiba, Kazunari Ninomiya, and Jun Matsumoto – formed in 1999 and released their first single A-RA-SHI in November that year. They went on to release multiple million-seller albums over the next two decades. In June 2019, they released their 20th anniversary compilation 5x20 All the BEST!! 1999-2019 and staged the ARASHI Anniversary Tour 5x20 across Japan last year. The band, who are national icons in Japan, announced in January 2019 that they would be going on hiatus from 2021.

Frances Moore, chief executive of IFPI, said: “ARASHI are an iconic Japanese band that have built a huge and very dedicated fanbase across Asia throughout their twenty-year music career. We would like to congratulate the artists on winning this award which is testament to their incredibly strong catalogue and career longevity.” 

Taylor Swift’s seventh studio album Lover was the second biggest global album of 2019. Released in August 2019, it debuted at number one in Australia, Canada, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, the UK, and the US amongst others, and reached three million album-equivalent units worldwide by the end of its first week of release.

MAP OF THE SOUL : PERSONA, the sixth EP from South Korean band BTS, takes third place in the 2019 chart. Not only is it the best-selling album ever in South Korea, but it also reached number one in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, UK and the US, marking the first time a Korean act has topped the charts in each of those countries.

The IFPI Global Top Ten Album Chart combines global sales of physical and digital album downloads to rank the top albums of the year. The chart includes physical and digital album unit sales only.

 

Top 10 Global Albums 2019 

Rank	Artist	Album Name	Global units (millions)
1	ARASHI	5x20 All the BEST!! 1999-2019	3.3
2	Taylor Swift	Lover	3.2
3	BTS	MAP OF THE SOUL : PERSONA	2.5
4	Lady Gaga	A Star is Born OST	1.2
5	Billie Eilish	WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO?	1.2
6	Queen	Bohemian Rhapsody	1.2
7	Ed Sheeran	No.6 Collaborations Project	1.1
8	Ariana Grande	thank u, next	1.0
9	Rammstein	Rammstein	0.9
10	The Beatles	Abbey Road	0.8

(source: IFPI. Units are rounded to one decimal place.)

 

The IFPI Global Album of 2019 is the third award from IFPI’s annual global charts following the announcement that Taylor Swift was the Global Recording Artist of the Year 2019 and bad guy by Billie Eilish was the biggest digital single of 2019.