The statistics, as Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason puts it, “make staggering reading.”

In the 35 years that have elapsed since the March 1973 release of The Dark Side Of The Moon, this one LP has sold in excess of 40 million copies worldwide. Recent figures insist that one household in four in the U.K. owns a copy of either the LP, CD or cassette; in the United States, one person in 14 either owns, or has owned, a copy.

In a poll of the world’s biggest selling albums of all time, the LP more or less ties the soundtracks to “Saturday Night Fever” and “The Bodyguard” for second place (Michael Jackson’s Thriller, of course, occupies the top spot) and, while The Dark Side of the Moon only ever spent seven days at the top of the Billboard album charts, still it remained on those listings for a staggering 741 weeks before a change in the way the charts were compiled, in April 1988, shifted it to the Pop Catalog chart, and its dominance continued there.

In May 2006, The Dark Side of the Moon achieved a combined total of 1,500 weeks on the Billboard 200 and Pop Catalog charts, with the Wall Street Journal reporting that it continues to sell close to 10,000 copies every week.
Why? What was so special — nay, spectacular — about this album that it should so explode beyond the confines not only of Pink Floyd’s career, but of the rock music audience in general? 

Prior to the album release, Floyd had ticked along relatively smoothly, of course, topping the U.K. LP charts with its annual new releases, and, naturally, selling out their concert performances. But Floyd was never a big band, in the way that Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath or Jethro Tull were big; somebody once described Pink Floyd as the best-loved cult band in the world, and that summed it up nicely. 

A lot of people liked Pink Floyd, but they did so from at least a step away from unmitigated fandom and, if you put on one of the band’s earlier albums — Atom Heart Mother or Meddle or Obscured by Clouds — it was more likely to be as the soundtrack to some other (possibly illegal) activity, than because you really wanted to get down and boogie to the Floyd.

Then The Dark Side of the Moon came along, and all predictions were off.

Universal themes

Keyboard player Rick Wright reflected, “after we’d made it, actually sitting down to listen to it for the first time in the studio, I thought, ‘This is going to be big. This is an excellent album.’ Why it goes on and on selling, I don’t know. It touched a nerve at the time. It seemed like everyone was waiting for this album, for someone to make it.” Pink Floyd was simply the lucky first contender.

Nick Mason, too, is characteristically modest in his summation of the album’s charms. “The primary reason — which is true of any great album — is the strength of the songwriting. Dark Side contained strong, powerful songs [and] the overall idea that linked those songs together, the pressures of modern life, found a universal response and continues to capture people’s imagination. And the musical quality… established a fundamental Pink Floyd sound.  We were comfortable with the music, which had time to mature and gestate and evolve through live performances.”

There was more. “The additional singers and… sax gave the whole record an extra commercial sheen. In addition, the sonic quality of the album was state of the art. This is particularly important [as] hi-fi stereo equipment had only recently become a mainstream consumer item… As a result, record buyers were particularly aware of the effects of stereo and able to appreciate any album that made the most of its possibili

Record collectors. They’re a funny lot, really. Just ask yourself, for example, how many times you have replaced a particular disc in your collection. Once? Twice? Five times?

Any other collector, a philatelist or numismatist, for instance, might go a lifetime without ever again touching a particular favorite in their album… maybe upgrading if a better conditioned example comes along, but otherwise content in the knowledge that the space is filled, the gap is plugged, and it doesn’t matter how many brightly colored replicas come along, their original acquisition remains inviolate.

Record collectors, on the other hand….  You buy an album in 1973. A couple of years later you upgrade your sound system to quadraphonic, in the days when that was considered the wave of the future. So, you buy the album again. Quad withers and dies, and your old stereo copy is looking a little worn. You pick up a new copy, and, somewhere around the late 1970s, you maybe grab the picture disc as well, just because it looks so nifty.

The mid-1980s arrive, bearing with them, CD. Out with the old, in with the new. Except the CD doesn’t sound half as good, so you pick up the latest vinyl repressing, then upgrade the CD when the remaster arrives.

Another copy arrives as part of a box set, another turns up in SACD. An anniversary edition promises the best sound quality ever, and a DVD-Audio projects pretty images across your widescreen TV… a picture disc with a superiority complex! And so on and so forth until the fateful day when you’re browsing through a Pink Floyd discography, and you realize, to your horror, that you have now owned no less than a dozen different versions of Dark Side Of The Moon, and not one of them sounds as vital as the first one you ever purchased, all those decades before. But, whereas a stamp or coin collector would still have his copy filed neatly away, yours went to the used store long ago.

Thirty-five years is a long time in the life of a gramophone record, which is one reason why the above analogy doesn’t work. Most collectors dread the day when they find they have to physically touch their collectibles and would never dream of actually using them for the purpose for which they were intended. 

Record collectors, on the other hand, cannot help but play with their purchases, because what would be the point of owning them in the first place? And some records are simply born to be played and played and played again, until the stylus carves great chasms through the grooves, and the clicks and scratches are as loud as the music, the sleeve becomes tattered and the inserts get lost.

Of course you have to buy it again, and there’s something you’ve probably never thought about. Science has spent lifetimes trying to create a perpetual motion machine, without ever realizing that the music industry got there years ago. It’s called… us.

There again, Dark Side Of The Moon is one of those albums that does inspire undying loyalty. From the moment it was released, on March 17, 1973 (March 24 in the U.K. and Europe), Pink Floyd’s sixth studio album (ninth if you count soundtracks) was regarded as a cut above anything the band had ever released in the past and a monumental achievement by anybody’s standards. 

Stereo salesmen in particular adored it, and it’s still difficult, all these years later, to pass a hi-fi showroom without hearing an excerpt from Dark Side Of The Moon wafting out of the door. And, if it was good enough for them, then it was good enough for everyone. You would search long and hard to find anybody who was content to keep their copy of the album once it developed a scratch or two, because what is the point of pristine reproduction if it’s scarred with extraneous surfa