The oddity of the only five songs to have sold more than 30m copies
While you might have artists from the worlds of punk, rock, folk and all things in between say that commercial sales don’t matter, they do.
Granted, when it comes to making art, you can’t be pinned down by the idea of sales figures too much. If you follow a strict set formula, you might make something that sells, but it won’t necessarily be something innovative or cutting-edge. A lot of the biggest artists in the world took risks with their music, and in turn made something which is celebrated as a game-changer, but was at risk of not selling at all when it was first made.
Noel Gallagher put this dilemma into words pretty well, saying how you can’t always be clouded by what consumers are into, because a lot of the time, consumers don’t know what they want until it’s actually been made. “The customer didn’t want Jimi Hendrix. But they got him. And it changed the world,” said the Oasis guitarist, “The customer didn’t want The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s, but they got it. They didn’t want Sex Pistols, but they got it. Fuck the customer. The customer doesn’t know what he wants.”
While it makes sense to dispel the thoughts of the consumer from your mind while making art, there is no escaping that when your music is a commercial success, there must be some kind of validation embedded within that. Making something which is true to yourself and that people also resonate with around the world is no doubt rewarding.
When it comes to commercial success, though, there are only five songs in history that have managed to sell over 30million copies. With these tracks, it seems that innovation is set aside slightly, and instead, community is put at the heart of every single second of the track. It means that these five songs, which are technically the greatest-selling songs of all time, appear pretty odd when lined up next to one another, but their haphazard nature shouldn’t diminish their success.
So, what are the only five songs to sell over 30 million copies?
Well, three of them are Christmas songs: In 1935, Bing Crosby sold 30m copies of ‘Silent Night’, then, in 1942, he sold 50m copies of ‘White Christmas’. The only track out of these three not released by Crosby was ‘Petit Papa Noël’ by Tino Rossi. These show two things, which are that Christmas songs sell well, but also that the most popular music is that which connects people. Listeners will tune into these songs in a bid to feel festive, and in doing so, they share an intention with everybody else listening.
The same goes for another track that sold over 50m copies, Elton John’s ‘Candle in the Wind’, which topped the charts with 33m sales. This connected listeners because it had been rewritten and re-released in the wake of Princess Diana’s death, and so people collectively listened in a bid to mourn her passing.
Finally, the last entry is a slight anomaly given how new it is. When we talk of best-selling songs, we tend to focus on albums that came out when people bought physical records, as that’s a metric which is easier to follow; however, in 2020, Xiao Zhan made history by releasing the greatest-selling digital song of all time, ‘Spotlight’, which amassed 54.3m sales. This song garnered this much attention because it was released as a response to a boycott against Zhan on the Chinese internet. It may not be a global event, yet the song represents the results of a shared ideology among its listeners.
While lining up the five biggest-selling tracks of all time does highlight the stark mismatch, there is a common thread that runs through all of them, and that is the essence of connection.
