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What was the first classic rock song to sell 10 million copies?

Sun 14 December 2025 20:30, UK

Throughout the history of the charts, pop music has been the predominant force in driving record sales, but every once in a while, a classic rock song will shoot to the top and end up dominating the playing field when it comes to popularity.

Even though rock and roll music from the 1950s and ‘60s could reasonably be described as fitting into the boundaries of what constitutes ‘classic rock’, it wasn’t really until later in the ‘60s that the sound would become more defined through the emergence of bands such as Led Zeppelin and then The Who when they became more focused on creating elaborate rock operas rather than making rhythm and blues.

But where do you draw these boundaries? There’s an argument to be made that some of The Beatles’ music is definable as classic rock, with heavier tracks like ‘Helter Skelter’ certainly fitting into that categorisation, but earlier chart-topping material such as ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ is far easier to describe as being pop music, despite having all of the elements that would later become prevalent in classic rock as we know it.

It may be quite an amorphous term, but there are plenty of things that we can definitively say aren’t classic rock, and equally there are things that are much easier to describe in this way. But in terms of measuring its popularity, very few bona fide classic rock songs have ever seen so much success that they end up selling tens of millions of physical copies.

With vinyl sales having decreased significantly in the modern era due to the advent of streaming, and especially when it comes to single releases rather than with albums, there aren’t quite as many modern songs that can claim to have shifted this many units, but back in the heyday of both the charts and of physical sales, there were numerous acts who managed to achieve this rather impressive feat.

However, who was the first act to do so in the world of classic rock, and just how popular does a song have to be in order to make such an impression that it manages to eclipse the threshold of 10 million sales?

What was the first classic rock song to sell 10 million copies?

If we’re to accept that the likes of Elvis Presley and The Beatles are indeed examples of classic rock, then they would indeed be taking home the plaudits for having had the earliest examples of classic rock songs that sold over 10 million copies, with Elvis having achieved this first with ‘Hound Dog’, which he released in 1956. The Beatles would then achieve this later through the release of the aforementioned ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ in 1963, but there’s also Procol Harum’s ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ from 1967, which of the three suggested songs so far would probably have the most credentials to be classed as a classic rock track.

However, it wasn’t until 1991 when German rock outfit Scorpions released their Cold War anthem ‘Wind of Change’ that a true classic rock song was able to surpass 10million sales, with the song overall managing to acquire 14 million physical sales since its release.

Interestingly, one other possible contender for this would be The Knack’s 1979 hit ‘My Sharona’, which despite being released before the Scorpions’ hit by a dozen years, didn’t actually manage to pass 10 million sales until 2010, meaning that it would have taken longer for this to have reached the eight-figure amount.