10 Best-Selling Rock Singles Of All Time
Yes, Imagine Dragons IS everywhere.
Once upon a time, rock music was the thing. The chart toppers were four and five piece bands with guitars on their hips and groundbreaking solos in their souls. Alas, no more!
The musical landscape has changed over the past few decades, not just in what we listen to but how we listen to it. On the positive side of things, digital sales have transformed releases to allow any song from an artist's oeuvre to be picked up on its lonesome, although if a record label hasn't released the track as a single in its own right, it still won't benefit from the usual promotion of music videos, radio play and TV spots.
At the same time, however, pop, hip-hop and electronic music have saturated the charts, and rock songs no longer make up any sort of majority. But then, tremendously popular songs are experiencing less actual sales of any kind at all, as streaming increasingly becomes the dominant form of auditory consumption.
Nevertheless, there is still a substantial body of bonafide sales success to delve into from the past 70 years or so, in our endeavour to uncover the best selling rock singles of all time.
As record labels and chart companies keep their actual figures close to their chests, all figures herein are estimated based on the best available data from the BPI (British Phonographic Industry), RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) and various music magazines, and adjusted to actual sales, i.e. excluding streaming.
10. Awolnation, ‘Sail’ (2010)
Total weeks on the Billboard Hot 100: 79
YouTube views to date: 198 million
Awolnation's one-hit-wonder came along at the right time for both the band and music in general. An experimental track with the right blend of mainstream appeal to help it catch on, while still sitting comfortably within the "rock music" classification, 'Sail' has estimated actual sales of nine million singles globally, including the coveted RIAA Diamond certification.
Originally premiering on US rock radio in 2010, the single was a slow burner, failing to enter charts until mid-2011, where it spent 20 weeks before dropping out altogether. Had that been the end of its journey, 'Sail' may never have made it at all. However, the song found a new lease of life in 2013 and beyond thanks to a series of fortuitous events.
The track's promotional use in a variety of TV shows and adverts exposed it to a much broader audience and, following its appearance in a trailer for the hit History Channel series Vikings, weekly downloads tripled. Couple this with the overwhelming popularity of YouTuber Nanalew's fan video for the track, which racked up over 350 million views in the two years before the single had its own official music video, and Awolnation were onto a winner.
With digital sales helping it reach comparable popularity in the UK and farther afield, 'Sail' found unprecedented success, proving for one of the final times this century that some branches of rock music still have massive appeal.