MTV Unplugged continually amazes us all with the number of top-selling albums that came from the series. It upheld the quality of live music albums in the 1990s and for years after. Well over 80 million albums from the series have been sold. The top ten sellers from the series astonishingly made up over 70 million of those sales. The next five MTV Unplugged albums on a ranked sales list all have over one million in sales.
That's an outrageous level of success which was surely well beyond the expectations of producers Robert Small and Jim Burns. The pair put their idea in place back in 1989 with the very first MTV Unplugged show. At the outset, their thinking was based on stripped-back acoustic performances with no or minimal electrics involved.
That concept saw some variation and stretching over the years raising a question or two about some of the albums that followed. A few of these five albums, just below the top ten, certainly make you think twice about it. They all came from the Unplugged TV series and most carried the name, but just how unplugged were they really?
Five MTV Unplugged albums with more than one million in sales
Let's take a closer look at those next five MTV Unplugged albums on the ranking list. This is based on worldwide sales as recorded online at Best Selling Albums. Again, if your favorite artist or unplugged album isn’t here, then they just didn't sell more than the 1m copies needed to hit the top fifteen.
Tony Bennett - MTV Unplugged - 1.05 million (copies sold)
This is a more true-to-the-concept unplugged album. But then when was Tony Bennett ever really plugged in and wired up to the max anyway? This small affair with Bennett and his backing trio is close to normal anyway. Nor was there much need for lots of rearrangements of the songs. His classic numbers here were perfect for this approach.
Bennett was aged 67 when this was recorded in 1994. The bulk of his musical career was seemingly behind him but with bags of experience to hand. Unplugged helped remarket him and extend that career for longer, while remaining cool and respected by all.
The album has him paired up at times with Elvis Costello and then k.d. lang. His links with current artists and MTV Unplugged continued over the years. Bennett’s last TV appearance was back on the show in 2021 appearing with Lady Gaga.
Bennett’s unplugged album was crammed with top tunes, 22 of them in fact. The majority are American Songbook classics. At times it was just like Bennett was back as a lounge room singer in a small venue. But that's a bonus for us as listeners, not by any means a criticism. The album has sold just above a million copies, a testament to its quality. It also brought the 1995 Record Of The Year Grammy Award to Bennett.
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Ricky Martin - MTV Unplugged - 1.07 million
This album came relatively later than many top sellers in the series. Recorded in Miami in August 2006 it was released that November. Puerto Rican Ricky Martin had a strong Latin American following and was very popular in Europe too. That helped boost the worldwide sales so far to just over one million copies.
It is one of the MTV Unplugged series albums that tests the format somewhat. It’s a full-on live performance from Martin but he is backed by his band with strings and horns, plus keyboards and electric bass. So not entirely stripped back or unplugged then.
The recording and album come a few years after some of his biggest single hits, the very pop-based and commercial “Livin’ La Vida Loca” and “She Bangs” for example. Surprisingly perhaps neither are featured here though Martin’s many fans won't mind that. Especially the Latin-based ones.
His set is in Spanish and covers a variety of other hits and some new songs at the time too. The mix between upbeat and softer romantic songs leans more in favor of the latter, but the energetic rhythms are there for sure. For Martin fans, it’s a decent album. It may feel like a slightly odd selection for the unplugged treatment but works well, as the high sales reflect.
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Alicia Keys - Unplugged - 1.35 million
Here’s another album testing the unplugged boundaries. Alicia Keys recorded her Unplugged album in July 2005 in front of a large audience at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York. She too had backing from her 16-strong band with an electric bass and organs, plus a large group of backing singers. Quite a way from the small crowd at an intimate venue as was the case for the much earlier MTV Unplugged sessions.
That tends to make this closer to a live album for Keys generally than a uniquely different style and sound. Though she isn’t particularly full of chatter and personality on stage to add that authentic live feeling. All the same, it’s a good album from the soul star.
The album has a couple of singles released from it, “Unbreakable” and “Every Little Bit”. The former reached number 34 on the Billboard 100. The latter single didn't chart. The album itself was pretty successful. Those 1.35m sales make it the 13th biggest-selling MTV Unplugged album. On release, it went straight to number one on Billboard, which hadn't been seen for an MTV Unplugged record since the days of Nirvana over ten years before.
Reviews generally were kind, she does put on a decent show after all. And those record sales can't be wrong. Some critics expected something different from the album and Keys herself. Perhaps it needed to be less grand and plugged and get closer to the smaller stripped-back album style. But then what do the critics really know, it sold plenty!
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Page & Plant - No Quarter: Jimmy Page and Robert Plant Unledded - 1.44 million
This was always going to be spectacular. Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant and Jimmy Page combining in 1994 for a show in the MTV Unplugged series was pretty huge news. Plant has later revealed a key caveat of the agreement with MTV though. The show wouldn't be unplugged at all.
But as a gesture to the concept, the pair agreed to rework a range of Led Zeppelin songs, not necessarily all the top hits, and some of them would be broadly acoustic. Well, if it got the pair working together again, that’s close enough for me!
It was just the two Led Zeppelin members getting back together. John Paul Jones wasn't involved in the discussions to set it up, nor the event itself. So the much-awaited reunion of the remaining three band members wasn't yet on. The MTV session was labeled as Unledded for good reason then.
It was a spectacular show when the recording sessions in Morocco, London, and Wales were edited together for MTV. Fourteen songs are on the album. They include experimental new songs with Moroccan musicians and instruments giving us "City Don't Cry", "Wah Wah" and "Yallah/The Truth Explodes”. There are also classics like “That’s The Way”, “The Battle of Evermore” and a brilliant version of “Kashmir” to close the show.
Ok, it wasn't Led Zeppelin. And with some electric guitar from Page in there, it wasn’t unplugged either. But it's a fabulous show and album and well worth hearing Plant and Page delivering so well.
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Alanis Morissette - MTV Unplugged - 1.8 million
When Alanis Morissette recorded this in September 1999 she had four albums to draw on. That included two big-hitting ones in Jagged Little Pill (1995) and Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie (1998). But she didn't follow the usual tendency of cramming the session with lots of her top hits from Jagged Little Pill in particular. Just four songs from the six singles on that album, most obviously the huge single hit “Ironic”. A surprise omission perhaps was “All I Really Want”.
Instead, there was more of a focus on her fourth album released the previous year, but to less acclaim and sales. Even then, she held back on a couple of its hits too, giving “Thank U" and "So Pure" a miss. Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie was a quite personal and intimate album and that comes across in this set too.
Alongside the touching songs, her performance involves the small crowd and draws in the album listener as if you were there. Enough of what wasn’t there, among the twelve songs on the album were three new ones. I really liked “No Pressure Over Cappuccino” from those. There was also a cover of The Police song “King Of Pain” which worked really well with Morissette’s voice and style.
This album from Alanis Morisette is just outside the top ten MTV Unplugged albums in terms of worldwide sales. It sits in 11th place with 1.8m sales, those above sold at least two million copies, so it’s only just below that level. You can read more about the top ten MTV Unplugged albums if you want to check which artists are included.