Alan Jackson’s 50 Million Sales Stack Up

Alan Jackson photo courtesy of SonyBMG Nashville.

Aug. 15, 2008 — While Alan Jackson’s label threw a party for him on Wednesday to commemorate the sale of 50 million albums, it’s actually a bit difficult to fathom the enormity of the accomplishment.

If, for example, 50 million CDs were stacked on top of each other, it would take 1,248 stacks the height of the Empire State Building to accommodate the entire mass. If 50 million CDs were laid end to end, they would stretch for 4,439 miles — longer than the distance from Nashville to Hawaii.

Alan, who famously referred to himself as a "singer of simple songs," has trouble grasping the number, too. So when he considers it, he puts the accomplishment in personal terms.

"I think about [how] there's 50 million CDs out there somewhere, in some guy's truck in his CD player out there in Montana or somebody's downloaded the album on their iPod in New Jersey," he says. "That's what's still amazing to me. I don't travel the world really, but I've been a lot of places. And I fly into these little islands in the Bahamas and over in the ocean and fish and stuff. And I've gone to places where you'd think it's as remote as it can be, and I'll land, get out of the airplane, and some little native fellow there will be holdin' one of my CDs wantin' me to sign it. The satellite dish has really brought a lot of that around."

At least 500,000 of those 50 million sales are of Alan’s latest album, Good Time. He’s already had two hits off the project — "Small Town Southern Man" and the title track — and Arista Records is gearing up to release a third single the label hopes will lead to even more sales: "Country Boy."