What is the best-selling rock single of all time?
Although the album format has been the primary way for artists to express themselves since the days of The Beatles, the single has always been a fundamental tool in their arsenal. Before the Fab Four, the single was the leading format artists and labels would use to fill their coffers and earn new fans. It made sense; they were digestible snapshots of their sound.
Offering insight into this shift to albums, The Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards once said: “In a way, the most important thing maybe The Beatles and ourselves did was to treat every track we were cutting as if it was a potential single, and even if you knew it wasn’t going to be, you still put that much work into it. Which inevitably, after a few years, is the reason that albums started to become important instead of just 45s.”
While 45s might have gone out of fashion, the single format eventually returned, and since then, it has remained a staple of the music industry. There’s no doubt that music has changed markedly since the days when vinyl ruled the roost, but singles, whether physical or digital, are still vital for getting fans on board with an artist’s latest project and attracting new listeners. Just think how different the world would be without the release of Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ or how 2024 would have been lacking without the Charli XCX singles preceding Brat.
Rock music is one genre that has a particularly healthy relationship with the single that goes right back to its early days. Rock ‘n’ roll pioneer Bill Haley’s ‘Rock Around the Clock’ – one of the fastest-selling singles of all time – has sold 25 million copies. Elsewhere, fellow rock ‘n’ roll legend Elvis Presley, who had his fair share of best-sellers, is also in the top ten best-selling rock singles of all time, with ‘It’s Now or Never’ selling 20m copies.
Of course, The Beatles, the band that changed music and the world, is also featured on the list. 1963’s ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’, their first US hit, sits further down the top ten of the best-selling rock singles of all time with 12m copies.
So, what is the best-selling rock single of all time?
It’s not just influential rock songs that make the top ten. Due to the tremendous humanitarian relief efforts for Africa in the 1980s, two of rock’s best-selling singles in history are Band Aid’s ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’ and USA for Africa’s ‘We Are the World’.
While The Beatles and Elvis Presley are on the list, they are both beaten by a surprising figure: Elton John. There’s no doubt that Elton John was a master of weaponising the music that inspired him into an expressive sonic mass, but the song of his that sits at the top is slightly astounding, the 1997 rework of ‘Candle in the Wind’.
However, considering that it was revised for Princess Diana’s funeral, it’s less of a surprise that it has sold 33m copies, with immense crossover appeal as a unifying number in such a heartbreaking moment. It shows that sometimes, pure emotion can trump even a catchy melody.
