It’s 2026: Why is ‘Rumours’ still one of America’s bestselling albums?

Luminate, whose data powers the Billboard charts, has revealed 2025’s top-10 bestselling vinyl albums, with Fleetwood Mac‘s 1977 album Rumours landing at #6. The project also placed at #16 on the Billboard 200 for the week of Jan. 17. In his new book Don’t Stop, Alan Light explores why Rumours resonates with new generations of fans.

“I think if you had sat down the music establishment on Dec. 31, 1979, and said, ‘Here are the five biggest records of the decade…50 years from now, which of these is gonna stand up the strongest and are young people gonna be listening to?,’ not one person would have said Rumors,” he told ABC Audio.

A key reason, Light argues, is that Rumours has inspired several pop cultural moments, from a Glee episode and the TikTok video of the guy lip-syncing to “Dreams” to the plots of Daisy Jones & the Six and the play Stereophonic. 

Another reason is Fleetwood Mac’s lineup of three singers/songwriters: Stevie Nicks, Christine McVie and Lindsey Buckingham. “For kids who didn’t grow up listening to albums as albums, having one guy singing at you for 45 minutes is maybe a lot for their patience,” he says.

Light notes that the “constantly shifting” perspectives, voices and sounds on Rumours make it sound less like an album and more like a playlist, a format young people are used to. The dominance of women on the project also align with today’s pop music, which he says is largely “defined by female artists.”

That resonance helps explain why young fans want to physically own the album.

“There is something about the mystique, the aura, the feeling [of Rumours] that makes these young listeners … want to have it near them,” Light says. “Several of [them] said, ‘I don’t have a turntable, but I want to make sure that when I get one, the first thing that I play on it will be Rumours.'” 

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