Fleetwood Mac's Rumours has been critically and commercially lauded since it first landed in record bins in February 1977. And the U.K. Official Charts has announced that the album is the best-selling vinyl album of the 21st century, from records that were released between 1970-1999.
Surprisingly, the album didn't net the band a U.K. No. 1 single. However, it did generate four U.S. Top Ten singles: "Go Your Own Way," "Dreams," "Don't Stop," and "You Make Loving Fun," with "Dreams" reaching No. 1.
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Rumours has spent a total of 1,042 weeks on the Official Albums Chart since its release in 1977. And with compiled data, Rumours has logged 280,000 vinyl sales since the beginning of the new millennium. And what happened in the U.S. is much the same. It won the Album of the Year at the 1978 Grammy awards and ha since been certified 21× Platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). As of February 2024, Rumours had sold over 45 million copies worldwide.
The dynamics and inter-personal relationships within Fleetwood Mac have been largely held up as one of the more successful ingredients and inspirations in Rumours' songwriting success. Those aspects – the disintegration of the McVies' marriage, the split of Buckingham and Nicks and Fleetwood's divorce and soon-be-affair with Nicks – coupled with copious amounts of drugs and their label-paid lifestyle, led to unprecedented sales, airplay and concerts. Nicks noted in a 2001 Billboard interview that at the start of the Rumours tour the band initially encountered poor reception to the new material. Circumstances would quickly change as the album started to latch onto radio, and approving reviews from music critics gave it a huge stamp of approval.
In the decades since then, Rumours has been cited innumerable times in both fan and critics top lists. In April 1998, Q listed it at number three—behind The Clash's London Calling and Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon—in its list of the "50 Best Albums of the '70s."
And just to put a fine point on it: Rumours re-entered the Official Charts and sits in the Top Ten as of this writing. Who knew broken relationships made for a decades-long affair?