Building a 100 album vinyl collection 3 must have albums are?


No opera or rap in the three must haves. Sorry.

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U2 - Joshua Tree (1987). "Without or Without You" (track #1) to benchmark the Bass.

Fleetwood Mac - Rumors (1977). #1 selling album of all time until Thriller (1982).

Pink Floyd - Dark side of the moon (1973). Amazing collection of sounds including a black hole, recorded at Abbey Road! If you don’t take drugs this may encourage you to start!

The latter two are still among the top-10 selling albums of all time with 30m+ sales!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_albums

I don’t really listen to classical but as a substitute I’d pick some art rock albums from Genesis or Phil Collins after he sold out. Did you know that Phil Collins is like the #2 or #3 selling pop artist of all time with over 130m album sales?

Genesis - Duke (1980). Their Opus during the art-rock stage.

Genesis - Turn it on Again (1999). Their Greatest hits from their Pop period but a few art-rock songs still like Abacab ...

Simon & Garfunkel - Greatest Hits (1972). What can I say their songs are still being used on sound tracks 50 (!) years later (The Orville 2022 episode "Domino") and they are the #1 folk group of all time! For #2, Peter Paul & Mary.

Dire Straits - Money for Nothing (1988). This greatest hits album is titled by the song "Money for Nothing", which is a frequent benchmark for dynamic range in turntable systems. This has one of the very greatest lead-ins of any song of all time. I don’t often listen to Dire Straits, but when I do, so do the neighbors!

Dave Brubeck - Greatest Hits (1966).  If you aren't into Jazz Yet, this will GET YOU IN and it will truly exercise your turnable like nothing else!

Genesis:

Trespass, Foxtrot, Nursery Cryme, Selling England by the Pound, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway.

Excellent question and some excellent recommendations already. Here are three jazz lps I love that I didn’t see mentioned yet:

Gil Evans, New Bottle, Old Wine

Ornette Coleman, The Shape of Jazz to Come

Eric Dolphy, Out to Lunch

+1 for previously mentioned Love, Forever Changes

Aja

Dark Side

Kind of Blue

Too easy. A better discussion if you are trying to discover (to some degree) under appreciated albums for a 100 must have list is to ask for 10 albums of a specific type: pop/rock, classic jazz (acoustic), progressive jazz, big band, heavy metal, classical, etc.

I would have included the following for a top 10 that haven't been mentioned (my apologies if I missed an already listed):

Cannonball Adderley - Something' Else (a Miles album in my mind)

Steely Dan - Royal Scam

The Who - Quadrophenia

Jackson Browne - Running on Empty

Alan Parsons - I Robot

Traffic - John Barleycorn Must Die

Boz Scaggs - S/T

Bill Evans - Portrait in Jazz

Pat Metheny Group - S/T

Springsteen - The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle

 

XTC- English Settlement

Kraftwerk - Computer World

Lee Morgan - The Sidewinder