Jason Aldean has bragging rights in the country community for 2014. His newest effort, Old Boots, New Dirt, is the only album from the genre to be certified as platinum. Other artists to reach the million sales mark this year were Taylor Swift with 1989 and Ariana Grande with My Everything. The soundtrack from Disney's Frozen also went platinum.
"We put so much time and passion into choosing the best songs for this album, and this brings a lot of hard work full circle for me," Aldean wrote in a statement, Rolling Stone Country notes. "It's like Christmas came early! I couldn't do it without the best country music fans in the world, who never stop believing in what I do and always follow me, even if I may take a creative left turn every now and then."
Old Boots, New Dirt sold 278,000 copies in its first week, propelled by the lead single, "Burnin' It Down." According to RSC, Sam Smith's In the Lonely Hour is expected to bring the count to four platinum-selling albums by artists before the end of the year.
"Even his big, guitar-driven songs owe as much to Nickelback as to Nashville — if the pedal steel on 'Two Night Town' sounds forlorn, maybe that's because it's competing for attention with gravelly alt-rock distortion," RSC wrote about the album.
Garth Brooks released his ninth studio effort, Man Against Machine, last month. The album is available digitally on the singer's website, but those numbers haven't been reported to Neilsen Soundscan. It's possible that Machine will hit the platinum mark given the country legend's following and the fact that it's his first album in 13 years, but we may never know for sure.
Last year, Eminem led the platinum albums list that included nine other artists. Luke Bryan, Imagine Dragons and Bruno Mars all hit one million copies. Florida Georgia Line, Drake, Beyoncé, Blake Shelton and Jay Z rounded out the list.
