Official Global Top Sellers of 2004 – with Sales

#11 Green Day – American Idiot – 4,700,000

During the Rock is dead era, Green Day came out of nowhere to drop one of the biggest comeback albums ever. When the release of American Idiot was announced the hype was low. After all the band had only found success with one of its previous six albums, 1995’s Dookie. The first two albums went unnoticed while the following 3 failed to reproduce that success, ending up as disappointments.

All this was true until tunes like the title track, Boulevard of Broken Dreams, Holiday and Wake Me Up When September Ends started to get airplay. Incredibly enough, the last 3 songs did most of their job only in 2005. Before that the album shipped a whopping 4,7 million units in 2004 thanks to the first song, and the heavy orders which kicked in when Boulevard of Broken Dreams was first issued.

These shipments didn’t remain on shop shelves as the smash of upcoming singles boosted the LP to a positive net shipment of 6,4 million units in 2005, good enough for #5 of the year, and a cumulative tally of 11,1 million copies in 15 months. Who said that rock was dead?