Grateful Dead Ties Elvis Presley & Frank Sinatra for Most Top 40 Albums Ever on Billboard 200 Chart

Grateful Dead meets Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra in the Billboard record books, as the band ties the latter two legends for the most career top 40-charting albums on the Billboard 200 in the 67-year history of the survey.

The band achieves its 58th top 40 album with its latest live archival release, Dave’s Picks, Volume 48: Pauley Pavilion, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, 11/20/71, as the set debuts at No. 33 on the Billboard 200 dated Nov. 11. The three-CD album captures a previously unreleased show recorded at the university’s Pauley Pavilion on Nov. 20, 1971. The collection also includes bonus live material recorded at an Oct. 24, 1970, concert at the Kiel Opera House in St. Louis.

Dave’s Picks is Grateful Dead’s continuing live archival release series, named for the group’s archivist, David Lemieux, that has been going strong since its first release in 2012. Releases in the series are issued exclusively on CD and in limited quantities. Notably, 40 of Grateful Dead’s 58 top 40-charting albums are from the Dave’s Picks series.

Here’s a recap of the acts with the most top 40-charting albums on the Billboard 200 since the list began publishing on a regular, weekly basis in March of 1956:

58, Grateful Dead
58, Elvis Presley
58, Frank Sinatra
54, Barbra Streisand
51, Bob Dylan
48, The Rolling Stones

Dave’s Picks, Volume 48 debuts on the Billboard 200 with 19,000 equivalent album units earned in the U.S. in the week ending Nov. 2, according to data tracking firm Luminate. All of that sum was driven by traditional album sales.

The Billboard 200 chart ranks the most popular albums of the week in the U.S. based on multi-metric consumption as measured in equivalent album units, compiled by Luminate. Units comprise album sales, track equivalent albums (TEA) and streaming equivalent albums (SEA). Each unit equals one album sale, or 10 individual tracks sold from an album, or 3,750 ad-supported or 1,250 paid/subscription on-demand official audio and video streams generated by songs from an album. For all chart news, follow @billboard and @billboardcharts on both X, formerly known as Twitter, and Instagram.