ALBUMS CHART: Sgt Pepper tops them all.

As the contrasting commercial popularity of, say, the Velvet Underground (a total of 11 weeks in the UK albums chart, highest career peak 47) and Westlife (13 number one singles, seven multi-platinum albums) testifies, the public and critics' musical tastes rarely coincide. But in the case of The Beatles' Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, opinion overlaps perfectly. The album voted more often than any other as the greatest ever made over the past four decades is also widely acknowledged as perhaps the very biggest seller.

Precisely how many copies Sgt Pepper has sold in the UK since its release on June 1, 1967, has long been the cause of debate among Fab Four fans, chart enthusiasts and industry observers, not least because of the age of the album, which means a good proportion of its sales were achieved at a time when any precise method of accurately recording actual over-the-counter sales was still around a decade and a half away. For a time, in fact, it was thought that Sgt Pepper had been replaced as the UK's all-time number one by Dire Straits' Brothers In Arms, which topped a specially-compiled chart of the biggest-selling albums of the previous 20 years in September 1987 to mark Radio One's first two decades on air. The crown, however, returned to Pepper in 1992 when EMI - on the 25th anniversary of the album's release - issued a statement to say new research it had undertaken revealed the Beatles album had sold more than 4m copies in the UK since its release, putting it back ahead of Brothers In Arms.

The most accurate sales figures yet for Sgt Pepper will be unveiled in a newly-compiled countdown put together by Music Week chart consultant Alan Jones for the Official Charts Company. This listing of the UK's top-selling albums in history which will be the subject of a VH1series in the fourth quarter.

The Beatles' eighth studio album in little more than four years, Sgt Pepper drew a line in the sand on its release in 1967, separating all that came before and after it. Suddenly, artists were defined as "rock" or "pop", "album artists" or "singles acts". Taking The Beatles' lead on this album, which took an unprecedented 129 days to record, so- called serious artists now wanted to spend months, rather than weeks, perfecting their new recordings, which could now end up viewed as "art" rather than just a pop combo's latest tunes.

In Sgt Pepper, more than at any other time before and after, The Beatles re-wrote the rules for the music business and their fellow artists. Even away ...