What was the first million-selling record?
Selling one million copies of a single piece of recorded music is no mean feat. In fact, now that streaming makes up two-thirds of global music revenues, shifting a million physical units of a song is pretty much impossible. We may never see it again. Then again, prior to the 20th century and the dawn of pop records, music was still sold in smaller numbers to the exclusive elites who could afford to buy sheet music or attend classical music concerts.
In the intervening years between commodified music being the preserve of the wealthy and today’s age of Spotification, a fair few artists have hit that magic seven-digit sales figure. There are several landmark records we can point to as the “first” to sell a million.
Take Dire Straits, for instance, whose 1985 behemoth of a soft-rock album Brothers in Arms was the first CD to sell over a million copies. Or rock and roll pioneer Fats Domino, whose 1949 release ‘The Fat Man’ became the first rhythm and blues song to breach seven digits in sales.
If we’re talking strictly long-play (LP) records, though, then Domino misses out on Harry Belafonte. Calypso, Belafonte’s 1956 Jamaican-inspired album, was the first 12-inch record to hit the million mark.
But even taking it back to the more general, inclusive definition of a record, Fats Domino was beaten to it by Bing Crosby’s ‘White Christmas’. And prior to Crosby, swing king Glenn Miller had sold a million of his 1941 single ‘Chattanooga Choo Choo’.
We’re still not there yet. A whopping 39 years before Miller’s biggest hit, another artist became the first million-seller in the history of the recording industry.
Not rock and pop, but pop opera?
His name was Enrico Caruso, an Italian opera singer who was celebrated across the world at the time. His 1902 recording of ‘Vesti la giubba’, the aria from Ruggero Leoncavallo’s opera Pagliacci, released by the G&T record label, would go on to sell more than a million copies. And according to the Guinness World Records, it was the first recording to do so.
The song features Caruso in his signature stage role as Pagliacci, the sad clown, who must continue performing despite just learning of his wife’s infidelity. The tragic passion with which Caruso imbues his performance on the recording, along with the power and depth of his voice and mastery of vibrato, made him sought after around the globe.
He would go on to record the song twice more, in 1904 and 1907, and from 1903 began performing regularly in North America. Most notably, he appeared regularly at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the city where he resided for much of the year during the remainder of his life.
And so, long before the music of the American Century was sold to the masses across the Atlantic, Italian opera was selling records by the million. While capturing the imagination of the United States in the process.