The 20 best-selling singles of all time
Record sales, or digital streaming figures of the modern age, don’t correlate with artistic merit or creative dynamism, but shifting anything over ten million records is certainly an achievement. Whether it can be attributed to rigorous financial and promotional backing or just plain old catchy songwriting, the artists listed here found a knack for selling singles in mind-bending profusion.
When collating the 20 best-selling singles of all time, a number of factors must be considered. Chiefly, with the dawning of the internet age, streaming platforms mean catchy new singles don’t so much sell as they permeate our tailored playlists and rack up streaming figures. In the olden days – sorry for making you feel old, baby boomers – people relied solely on vinyl records, and if we look far enough back, you may have dealt with Bakelite and shellac records (I’m looking at you, Bing Crosby).
To allow for the profound changes in demographic and technology over the 20th century and beyond, we have split the ranking into the top 20 best-selling singles in both physical and digital copies. Of course, this won’t be perfect with the in-between phase dominated by CDs, but we’ll just have to make do.
As expected, we have some of the usual suspects on the physical copies list, including The Beatles, Whitney Houston, Elvis Presley and Elton John, who reached second place with his 1997 re-release of ‘Candle in the Wind’. This time, the track was rewritten in honour of the late Dianna, Princess of Wales, rather than Marilyn Monroe.
Bing Crosby sits proudly in first place with ‘White Christmas’, which has sold 50 million copies worldwide since 1944. Lower down, we have Mariah Carey’s festive earworm, ‘All I Want for Christmas is You’, and Gene Autry’s ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer’ to get us in the mood for some eggnog.
With meteoric Christmas number ones becoming somewhat a thing of the past, the digital list shuns the eggnog in favour of the feature. Over the past two decades, collaborative songs with “featuring” in the title have steadily climbed. If you were ever wondering why that might be, just take a look below. Nearly half of the top 20 for digital sales are collaborative efforts.
See both lists below. The sales figures have been rounded to the nearest million.
Best-selling physical singles of all time
- Bing Crosby – ‘White Christmas’ – 50million
- Elton John – ‘Something About the Way You Look Tonight’ / ‘Candle in the Wind (1997)’ – 33million
- Mungo Jerry – ‘In the Summertime’ – 30million
- Bill Haley & His Comets – ‘Rock Around the Clock’ – 25million
- Whitney Houston – ‘I Will Always Love You’ – 20million
- Elvis Presley – ‘It’s Now or Never’ – 20million
- USA for Africa – ‘We Are the World’ – 20million
- The Ink Spots – ‘If I Didn’t Care’ – 19million
- Baccara – ‘Yes Sir, I Can Boogie’ – 18million
- Celine Dion – ‘My Heart Will Go On’ – 18million
- Mariah Carey – ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You’ – 16million
- Bryan Adams – ‘(Everything I Do) I Do It for You’ – 15million
- John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John – ‘You’re the One That I Want’ – 15million
- The Andrews Sisters – ‘Bei Mir Bist Du Schön’ – 14million
- Scorpions – ‘Wind of Change’ – 14million
- Prince Nico Mbarga – ‘Sweet Mother’ – 13million
- Kyu Sakamoto – ‘Sukiyaki’ – 13million
- Gene Autry – ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer’ – 12.5million
- The Beatles – ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ – 12million
- Andrea Bocelli and Sarah Brightman – ‘Time to Say Goodbye’ – 12million
Best-selling digital singles of all time
- Xiao Zhan – ‘Spotlight’ – 54million
- Ed Sheeran – ‘Shape of You’ – 42million
- Luis Fonsi (feat. Daddy Yankee) – ‘Despacito’ – 36million
- Rihanna (feat. Drake) – ‘Work’ – 33million
- The Chainsmokers and Coldplay – ‘Something Just Like This’ – 22million
- Ed Sheeran – ‘Perfect’ – 21million
- Wiz Khalifa (feat. Charlie Puth) – ‘See You Again’ – 21million
- The Chainsmokers (feat. Halsey) – ‘Closer’ – 21million
- Adele – ‘Rolling in the Deep’ – 21million
- Mark Ronson (feat. Bruno Mars) – ‘Uptown Funk’ – 20million
- Billie Eilish – ‘Bad Guy’ – 20million
- Ed Sheeran – ‘Thinking Out Loud’ – 20million
- Camila Cabello (feat. Young Thug) – ‘Havana’ – 19million
- Lil Nas X – ‘Old Town Road’ – 18million
- Carly Rae Jepsen – ‘Call Me Maybe’ – 18million
- Taylor Swift – ‘Love Story’ – 18million
- Adele – ‘Someone Like You’ – 17million
- Rihanna – ‘Needed Me’ – 17million
- Shawn Mendes and Camila Cabello – ‘Señorita’ – 16million
- Imagine Dragons – ‘Believer’ – 15million
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