– Sales: 3,719,000

By the year 2006, the music industry was in a state of volatile transition, with physical album sales continuing to dwindle and numerous labels struggling to adapt to new technologies. Reflecting as much, the year’s best-selling album, “High School Musical,” sold fewer copies than the best-selling album from any previous year during the SoundScan era. Of course, it could have been much worse for the soundtrack, which only sold 6,000 copies in its first week. Meanwhile, the movie was a cultural phenomenon and launched a franchise that raked in roughly $1 billion dollars for Disney.