(Credits: Far Out / Yvette de Wit / Francisco Moreno)
Since the early 1960s, rock and rollers have slowly adopted the album as their primary creative medium. As The Beatles began pioneering different recording techniques, artists left and right were looking to make projects that were more than just a bunch of songs thrown together with any real rhyme or reason. Then again, the art of creating a phenomenal rock single never truly went away.
Apart from the strength of an album statement, the single is a lot more tricky medium to master. Outside of the different directions coming from every song, a single needs to capture the audience’s attention in a relatively short timeframe, taking the magic that each musician is capable of and harnessing it into a grandiose statement that is impossible to resist.
Then again, the actual golden age of physical singles sales had begun long before The Beatles touched American soil. As rock and roll was starting to find its feet, Bill Haley hit upon one of the first beats of rock history with ‘Rock Around the Clock’ quickly becoming one of the fastest-selling singles of all time with 25 million copies sold.
In the wake of rock and roll’s birth, the first true pin-up star of the genre came from Elvis Presley. Shaking his hips and causing a stir in audiences around the world, songs like ‘It’s Now or Never’ were a good indicator as to where music would be going next, with Presley earning 20 million copies for the single.
While many artists may benefit from having a gimmick onstage, it sometimes helps to have a single tie-in to something more significant than the record industry. Much like ‘Rock Around the Clock’ was indebted to its appearance in the film Blackboard Jungle, Bryan Adams saw his greatest-selling single when penning the song ‘Everything I Do (I Do It For You)’ for the album Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.
No list of best-selling singles would be complete without The Beatles, though. From the first time they started to sell in America, the Fab Four became one of the biggest sensations in music history, with ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ becoming one of their first massive songs to crack the American market. The song’s success would later become so great that The Beatles would eventually get all five spots in the US top ten at once, with ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ standing alongside tracks like ‘Twist and Shout’ and ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’.
Any highly successful song knows how to tug at one’s heartstrings, and the greatest in their field have made a fortune playing to one’s emotions. Throughout the massive relief efforts for Africa in the 1980s, two of the biggest-selling singles of all time came from relief efforts, with the Band-Aid holiday single ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’ and USA for Africa’s ‘We Are the World’.
Appearing in the top spot was Elton John, who revised the original lyrics of his landmark track ‘Candle in the Wind’ to suit the funeral of Princess Diana and sold 33 million copies. Throughout every single release that has come and gone in rock history, though, there has to be more than just a catchy tune. Even though the song has to be good, it’s the emotion behind it that moves something in the audience’s gut.
10 best-selling rock singles of all time:
- ‘Candle in the Wind 1997’ – Elton John (33 million)
- ‘Rock Around the Clock’ – Bill Haley and His Comets (25 million)
- ‘It’s Now or Never’ – Elvis Presley (20 million)
- ‘We Are the World’ – USA For Africa (20 million)
- ‘Everything I Do (I Do It For You)’ – Bryan Adams (15 million)
- ‘Winds of Change’ – Scorpions (14 million)
- ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ – The Beatles (12 million)
- ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’ – Band Aid (11.7 million)
- ‘My Sweet Lord’ – George Harrison (10 million)
- ‘I’m A Believer’ – The Monkees (10 million)
