Who was the first musician to sell 100 million albums twice?
Any musician who claims not to be in the business for the money at least a little bit is lying to themselves.
Even though there are many people who would rather give anything to go back to being an anonymous musician once they start getting hounded by the paparazzi, there’s nothing that can replace the satisfaction of knowing that you’ve created one of the biggest songs that you can when it soars up the charts. But even if people sometimes reach for their guitars with stars in their eyes, the best songwriters are usually the ones who are in it to have some fun whenever they perform.
Sure, there are more than a few people who have the magnetic charisma like Elvis Presley, but by and large, some of the biggest names in music don’t necessarily have to be pinup stars by any means. No disrespect meant to the man, but Phil Collins looked like a convenience store manager when he got up onstage, and yet he’s responsible for making some of the biggest hits that the 1980s ever spat out.
But the thought of selling 100 million records is borderline unthinkable for someone breaking into the industry. Most people aren’t thinking along those lines anymore, but in the era when vinyl and CDs were the best mediums for music, getting to 100 million was still the musical equivalent of trying to climb Mount Olympus. It was never going to be easy, but Paul McCartney somehow found a way to do it twice.
McCartney is already in an exclusive club with Phil Collins and Michael Jackson for being one of the only stars to have reached that milestone, but do you really need me to explain why The Beatles sold 100 million records? They are the reason why modern pop music sounds the way it does, and even if you don’t like some of the tunes they were writing back in the day, no one can really deny the impact that they had from the songs they sang to the drugs they took to the clothes they wore.
So when someone scales the biggest height anyone has reached, no one really expects them to do the whole thing all over again. And while time is on McCartney’s side a little bit since he has a much longer solo career than most of his Beatles brethren, he had already surpassed that musical threshold long before he had even made some of the most impressive records of his later career.
While The Beatles hit that mark by the start of the 1970s, McCartney was awarded a place in the Guinness Book of Records for selling 100million records before the 1980s got underway. John Lennon hadn’t yet been taken from this world yet, but considering all of the hard work that Macca had put into keeping Wings going, it wasn’t hard to see why the rest of his country related to tunes like ‘Mull of Kintyre’ when he put it out in the middle of the punk movement.
And I’m not covering my bases with an ‘as of today’ distinction when it comes to McCartney’s records, either. He was the first person to sell 100 million records as a solo artist and in a band, and since the record industry doesn’t worry as much about the physical sales of albums anymore, those world records are going to be set in stone like that until the end of time when it comes to physical media.
It wasn’t always necessarily cool to be McCartney whenever he made some of his best tunes, but the fact that he could make it that far with his solo career was the best sign of what could be done when he stuck to his principles. He never apologised for writing silly love songs, and given the amount of people that had been turning up to his gigs and buying the records, it seemed the world didn’t have enough of them, either.
