Now That's What I Call Music!

The series began in the UK on November 28, 1983, launched by Virgin and EMI, complete with the grinning pig mascot borrowed from a 1930s Danish Bacon ad. It had been running for 15 years before America got a version. The US series launched in autumn 1998, brought over by music executive Bob Mercer, with competing major labels calling a truce and pooling their current radio hits onto one CD — which meant one disc really could hold everything on the radio that month.

The commercials are the memory: rapid-fire TV spots ran constantly on kids' and teen cable, snippet after snippet with the tracklist scrolling faster than you could read it, and for pre-Napster, pre-iTunes kids a NOW CD was how you owned the radio without pirating. The numbers were absurd: each of the first 29 US volumes went at least platinum. NOW 4, released July 18, 2000, became the first volume to top the Billboard 200 — billed as the first time an album of previously released hits had ever debuted at #1 in the US. NOW 5 went on to be certified 4× platinum, the most successful volume of the American series. NOW 7, released in July 2001, sold 621,000 copies in its first week. Eighteen US volumes have hit #1 — more chart-topping albums than any recording act except the Beatles.

The series outlived the CD era it defined. A recent volume sold about 7,500 first-week copies against NOW 7's 621,000, but it is still going, and the UK series reached NOW 100 in 2018.