10 Best-Selling Rock Albums Of The 1980s
3. Brothers In Arms - Dire Straits (30,000,000)
Dire Straits were in a nice little groove by the time 1985 came along.
Their last album had gone to number one in their native England and had sold over 600,000 copies. Sure, it was only number 19 in the US, but you can't win 'em all.
Surely their next album would do just as well, if not a little bit better.
Well, it certainly did better.
Brothers in Arms was the musical equivalent of a neutron bomb. It unleashed a wave of popularity that the band had never seen before, destroying all sorts of sales records in the process.
It became the first album in UK history to be certified as 10 times Platinum, as well as the first album ever to sell over a million copies in CD form.
It went to number one in every single country that it charted in and remains the eighth best-selling record in the history of British music.
The record has sold an estimated 30 million copies worldwide since it first hit shelves and it remains tied to the conversation about the most popular albums of all time.
Most of that was probably due to Money for Nothing - what a banger.