Until this week, only five albums in the 68-year history of the Billboard 200 had spent 700 weeks or more on the chart. This week (on the Sept. 14 chart) was Eminem’s 2005 best-of compilation. Curtain up: The hitsbecomes the sixth album to reach this milestone – and the first hip-hop set.
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Curtain up: The hits is ranked 198th according to Luminate with 8,000 album units sold in the US between August 30 and September 5.
Since 1956, when the charts were regularly published weekly, only five other albums have reached the 700-week mark. Here’s a look at those five, along with the albums that are next in line:
- 990 weeks, Pink Floyd, The dark side of the moon
- 851, Bob Marley, Legend: The Best of Bob Marley & The Wailers
- 821, travel, Journey’s greatest hits
- 758, Metallica, Metallica
- 710, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Chronicle: The 20 biggest hits
- 700, Eminem, Curtain up: The hits
- 692, Guns N’ Roses, Biggest hits
- 692, Bruno Mars, Doo-Wops and Hooligans
- 686, Nirvana, No matter
- 642, Michael Jackson, thriller
- 622, AC/DC, Back in black
- 619, Kendrick Lamar, good child, mAAd-city
- 611, Queen, Biggest hits
- 610, Adele, 21
- 601, Drake, Watch out
(All except The dark side of the moon are still in the charts this week)
Curtain up: The hits is Eminem’s first greatest hits album and contains songs from four of his first five studio albums: The Slim Shady LP (1999), The Marshall Mathers LP (2000), The Eminem Show (2002), the 8 mile Soundtrack (2002) and Encore (2004). (The set does not contain any songs from his 1996 debut album Infinitewhich he released before signing with Interscope Records.)
After The Slim Shady LP reached number 2 on the Billboard 200 in 1999, The Marshall Mathers LP debuted at number 1, becoming his first of 11 chart-toppers, including his most recent project, The Death of Slim Shady (Coup de Grace)in July. This run includes Curtain upwho spent two weeks at the top.
How come Curtain up spent more weeks on the charts than any of Eminem’s classic studio projects? That’s because of a Billboard 200 chart rule that came into effect in 2009. In December of that year Billboard allowed catalogue albums back into the charts (after they had been banned since 1991).
When streaming began to influence the charts in 2014, Billboard Introduced rules about where songs that appear on multiple albums should be attributed (e.g. a song that appears on both a studio album and a greatest hits album). Since then, songs are attributed to that artist’s album that sells the best in a given week (according to traditional album sales). So, Curtain up was able to stay on the charts for a historic number of weeks because A) catalog albums are now allowed to chart every week and B) the album contains many of Eminem’s big early hits (“Lose Yourself,” “My Name Is,” “Without Me,” “Stan,” etc.), which as a week-to-week collection add more to this album than to the original studio albums they appear on.
