Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - Mmem 0515: Anti-trivia: Best-selling songs of all time

Episode Date: February 26, 2016

This “anti-trivia” episode lists the best-selling songs of all time, as measured by sales of singles. We also go over the best-selling albums. What do you want to learn? Leave your question at http://MasterOfMemory.com/. Music credit: Maurice Ravel’s String Quartet, 2nd movement, performed by the US Army Band.

Master of Memory 515. Welcome to Master of Memory. I'm Timothy, and I'm here to answer your accelerated learning questions every day and to inspire and empower you to learn anything you want to learn faster than ever. Today it's another anti-trivia episode, and the trivia fact that we're basing this episode on is that someone might mention to you that 2014's best-selling song was Happy by Pharrell Williams. Now, the best-selling song of a certain year is relevant for one year, and probably a bit beyond that. But for me, to get outside of where I am in time and look at what is more relevant,

kind of more broadly, and is more relevant probably even for the long-term future, I should look at the long-term past and look at really what songs have stood the test of time or have sold so much in their own time that they've made a huge sort of cultural, I guess, impact just by the number of sales that they made. Now, the problem is that it's hard to measure songs by number of sales because songs sell in essentially two ways, or at least before streaming and streaming services like Spotify, songs sold in two ways, either as a single or as an album.

When you go with albums, obviously you have not just one song, but a whole bunch of songs. So if you take, let's say, the top five best-selling albums of all time, you end up with a few dozen songs, and it's hard to tell which of those songs are the most important, because all the albums' songs in a particular album get equal weight, because they had the same number of sales. But who knows how many, you know, or which one of those is getting more listens than the others. So to simplify things, let's look first at the singles. And I recommend going to my Spotify,

actually just following my Spotify playlist, best selling singles of all time. And I have about 80 songs in there, and they're all the songs that have gotten more than 10 million sales as a single. But just going at the top of the list for the songs that have more than 15 million copies, we have number one is White Christmas by Bing Crosby from 1942. Next, we have Elton John, 1997, and it's interesting, this is Comets. We have Rock Around the Clock, and that's 1954. Next, we have Nel Blu di Pinto di Blu, also known as Volare, a very fun Italian song from 1958 by Domenico Modugno. Next is Whitney Houston, I Will Always Love You, which is from The Bodyguard, basically what is widely considered a no-good film with great music,

and I personally agree with 50% of those sentiments. Next we have Elvis Presley, It's Now or Never, and then we have We Are the World, which is nominally by USA for Africa, but it was written by Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie. Next, the ink spots If I Didn't Care, 1939. Then we have You're the One I Want by John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John from 1978. Then we have Everything I Do, I Do It For You by Bryan Adams, 1991. And then My Heart Will Go On by Celine Dion, or however you pronounce her name. It's the Titanic song. So those are all of the singles that have gotten more than 15 million sales. And as I mentioned before, I have

a Spotify playlist that you can follow, and I've learned basically all the words of all of the songs that have gotten more than 10 million sales. That's about 80 songs, and I hear them all the time around me. It really works. Just search Spotify for best-selling singles of all time, and you should find my playlist. But now let's go by album, because it's hard to say that, you know, I mean, songs that sold more than 15 million sales aren't necessarily as important as certain albums that sold more than 40 million copies. I mean, let's just look at Thriller by Michael Jackson, the best-selling album of all time. It outsold basically all of the songs that I listed other than Bing Crosby's Silent Night. So Thriller probably sold around 50 million copies, maybe up to 70

million. That's how many they claim to have sold. So Michael Jackson's Thriller with all of the songs in there. Next we have ACDC's Back in Black, and then Pink Floyd, The Dark Side of the Moon, Whitney Houston, etc. in The Bodyguard Meatloaf, Bat Out of Hell The Eagles, Their Greatest Hits, 71-75 The Bee Gees, of course, Saturday Night Fever And then Fleetwood Mac, Rumors All of those supposedly got 40 million copies or more sold So those are some pretty important songs

Although again, you're talking about hundreds of songs when you're going by those numbers because those are albums, not individual songs. For me personally, you're probably getting more bang for your buck if you just follow, let's say, the top 80 songs by individual sales. And so you obviously, again,

you can do that by following my Spotify playlist. I feel like I'm selling you something, but it's just something you can follow for free. Just search for best-selling singles of all time in Spotify. Our next anti-trivia episode on Monday is going to cover the history of indoor lighting. So that's putting Edison's invention of the light bulb into historical perspective. Meanwhile, what do you want to learn? The world's knowledge can be yours. Leave your learning request at masterofmemory.com slash question and I'll talk to you again soon.