Fastest-selling album (one country)

Greatest Works of Art by the “King of Mandopop”, Jay Chou (China, b. Jay Chou Chieh-lun), sold a reported 5 million copies in mainland China in the week following its release on 15 July 2022. The 15th studio album of the prolific singer-songwriter’s career, Greatest Works of Art has outsold traditional albums (i.e., physical and digital copies) by the likes of Stray Kids (★★★★★ (“5-Star”) – 4.617 million first-week copies in South Korea in 2023), Hikaru Utada (Distance – 3.002 million first-week copies in Japan in 2001) and record-shattering US albums by Taylor Swift (The Life of a Showgirl – 3.479 million first-week copies in 2025) and Adele (25 – 3.378 million first-week copies in 2015).

Greatest Works of Art topped the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry’s (IFPI) Global Album Sales Chart in 2022, shifting some 7.2 million copies in that year alone, while Chou was ranked at No.9 on the IFPI’s Global Recording Artist Chart in the same year.

The highest-reported first-week sales for a music release worldwide is 5,091,887, for South Korean boy band SEVENTEEN’s Seventeenth Heaven EP, released on 23 October 2023 after amassing an unrivalled 5.2 million pre-orders. The eight-track release with a running time of 26 minutes 45 seconds is regarded as an EP rather than an album and is therefore not counted.