What is the best-selling single in Australian history?
As ever, the UK and US musical exports dominate the Australian pop charts’ record books.
A perusal across the Australian Recording Industry Association’s big seller league tables reflects just how heavyweight both sides of the Atlantic’s rock and pop stature stand across the Western world, the Top Ten of all-time Aussie big hitters accounting for about 80% hoarded by the age-old ‘special relationship’.
Sifting through the yanks and pommes clogging the Aussie charts for some homegrown talent, Tones and I’s ‘Dance Monkey’ sits at number 12 of the country’s all-time unit shifters, in at number 19 is 5 Seconds Of Summer’s ‘Youngblood’, before Dean Lewis’ ‘Be Alright’ can be found punching at 23.
Curiously, none of Australia’s globally conquering artists translates to singles sales record breakers. Among the upper echelons of ARIA’s platinum ranking, there’s no AC/DC, INXS, or Kylie Minogue, nor are there single efforts from the country’s album heavyweights, Meat Loaf, Shania Twain and John Farnham, counting monster LPs but taking a good scroll down the ARIA list to see where their promo numbers square up.
When it comes to Australia’s all-time biggest-selling singles, third place goes to UK indie outfit Glass Animals’ ‘Heat Waves‘, boasting a respectable 1,610,000 certified units under their belt. Taking silver medal, Las Vegas’ The Killers shifted as many as 1,750,000 copies of the immortal ‘Mr Brightside’, a 2000s anthem that just never seems to die, even after two decades, as much a perennial indie club spinner in the UK as over in Aus.
Yet, despite the British and American presence all over the ARIA rankings, one Aussie act managed to shove aside all competition and confidently sit at gold’s top spot of the country’s biggest-selling number ever.
So what is Australia’s biggest-selling single?
He was already fairly big. Making a name for himself as drummer and co-vocalist for popular Melbourne band The Basics, indie popster Wally De Backer would pursue a solo career, dropping Boardface and Like Drawing Blood to domestic acclaim and respectable chart success.
It was 2011 when the world knew Gotye’s name, however. Seemingly out of nowhere, beyond his small but dedicated fanbase, De Backer’s solo alias would drop the second single to Making Mirrors, a global smash that topped the charts across the UK, USA, his Australian home, and over 30 other countries. Pushed by its distinctive music video, Gotye’s reflective ode to old romantic flames, backed by Kiwi singer Kimbra, ‘Somebody That I Used to Know’ would immediately stand as both artists’ defining number and an art-pop anthem of the decade.
According to ARIA’s accreditations, ‘Somebody That I Used to Know’ stands tall as an Australian 26× Platinum seller, shifting 1,820,000 certified units and reigning as the country’s all-time best seller, as well as hitting multiple platinum sales across ten countries with its 13million copies flying around the globe. Elsewhere, Gotye’s mammoth hit broke digital records, streamed more than 2.3billion times on Spotify, and racked up a whopping 2.6b views on YouTube at the time of writing.
