Who is Australia’s biggest-selling artist?
Much of Australia’s musical roster doesn’t even make a dent in the unit-selling record books.
While boasting the likes of INXS, Nick Cave, and the pop sensation Kylie Minogue, all of Down Under’s seemingly mainstream rock and pop royalty are dwarfed by the US and UK music canon, as is the case for much of the world. Perhaps where Australia’s unique sensibility comes from, cutting records however they want with a lack of regard for wider appeal. And before you ask, Crowded House are Kiwi.
The unmistakable ‘no fucks given’, ‘good cunt’ vibes power the country’s glittering punk heritage, from the earliest days of Ollie Olsen’s new wave legacy to the explosion of egg and garage that’s permeated Australia’s Melbourne and Sydney areas over the last ten years. Even in the film world, ‘Strayan features like Mad Max, Bad Boy Bubby, or Wake in Fright seem inconceivable to have been made anywhere else in the world.
Australia’s pop reach extends far, however. Olivia Newton-John’s ‘Physical’ stands as the 1980s’ biggest-selling single, and Tones and I’s ‘Dancing Monkey’ megahit is one of the most-streamed songs by an artist ever. Domestically, ‘You’re the Voice’ bellower John Farnham enjoys the distinction of an album that sold the most in his native country, 1986’s Whispering Jack in at number three after Shania Twain’s Come On Over and Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell.
The Bee Gees come close in the all-time rankings. Born on the Isle of Man but emigrating to Australia as children, the dual-national Gibb brothers would return to the UK and forge a mammoth pop career across music’s evolving trends, from baroque pop, disco zenith, and sophistipop balladry across their 30-year heyday, Saturday Night Fever soundtrack standing as a mammoth album seller and 1987’s ‘You Win Again’ marking the trio out as the first group to strike a UK number one in three consecutive decades. With certified sales alone, the Bee Gees count over 75million units, with claimed sales as high as 120m.
Yet, few bands in the world, let alone Australia, come close to one Aussie band’s towering commercial success.
So who is Australia’s biggest-selling artist?
It’s a formula that works. Founded in 1973, Sydney’s Malcolm and Angus Young guitar brothers took hard rock and boiled it down to its essential fundamentals.
Basic riff attack, lyrical dwellings about girls, partyin’, and being hard, and an irreverent schoolboy get-up for the lead axeman would duckwalk into rock’s glittering hall of fame, AC/DC paving the way for heavy metal and offering a virile and hypermasculine antidote to punk and new wave’s political nihilism.
Worshipped records like Powerage, Highway to Hell, and Back in Black would sell ungodly levels, the latter the second biggest selling album of all time, only beaten by Michael Jackson’s Thriller. In 16th place of the all-time selling artists, AC/DC counts upwards of 188million certified sales, placing the Australian clod rockers in the commercial second place in the hard rock world behind only Led Zeppelin.
