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Oasis overtake The Beatles in all-time UK album chart
Oasis's 1995 album (What's The Story) Morning Glory? has overtaken The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band to claim third place on the Official Charts Company's all-time UK albums list, driven by renewed interest following the band's 2025 reunion tour. The milestone, published to mark the 70th anniversary of the weekly UK album chart, highlights the record's enduring popularity, with tracks such as Wonderwall and Don't Look Back in Anger continuing to resonate with new audiences decades after release.
The Oasis album has amassed 6.2 million UK chart units combining sales and streams, while Sgt. Pepper's has slipped from third to fifth place over the past decade. Queen's Greatest Hits remains the best-selling album of all time, followed by Abba's Gold, with Adele's 21 rising to fourth. Separately, the chart company also revealed Olivia Rodrigo's Sour as the most-streamed album of the 2020s so far, having spent 268 weeks on the chart since its 2021 release.
In short
- Oasis's Morning Glory overtakes The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's on all-time UK chart
- Reunion tour boosted streams, pushing it to number three
- Queen's Greatest Hits still tops the all-time list overall
Steelman: both sides, in good faith
The strongest fair case each way — we don't pick a winner.
The case for
The Official Charts Company's methodology is transparent and consistently applied across all music, accurately reflecting how contemporary audiences genuinely consume music in the streaming era. Morning Glory's accumulation of 6.2 million chart units represents sustained cultural engagement across generations; millions of listeners continue to choose this album decades after release. The 2025 reunion tour demonstrates real contemporary demand, confirming that this album remains culturally vital in ways that traditional sales figures alone might not capture.
The case against
Comparing streams to physical sales conflates fundamentally different metrics and makes cross-era comparisons invalid. The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's ranking was achieved through discrete purchases in an era of scarcity, where each unit represented an actual transaction. Streaming allows fractional plays of back-catalogue material that has simply been available for years, artificially inflating numbers and making meaningful historical comparison impossible.
Explained simply
The UK album chart ranks records by their popularity, using sales and, more recently, streaming figures. Its all-time list combines these measures into chart units, allowing albums from different eras to be compared.
Oasis are a Manchester band whose members include brothers Liam and Noel Gallagher. Their 1995 album Morning Glory features songs such as Wonderwall and Don't Look Back in Anger, and became one of the defining British pop records of the 1990s.
The Beatles were a Liverpool band whose 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is widely known for its distinctive sound and artwork. Comparing the two records shows how lasting popularity is measured across generations, even as the way people listen to music changes.
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