List of best-selling sheet music

This list contains some of the best-selling songs in terms of sheet music sales in music publishing history, with copies reportedly of over 3 million. Figures on sheet music —as with record sales— reported by publishing firms were not always reliable.^[1]

In the United States, before "Oh! Susanna" (1848) no American song had sold more than five thousand copies of sheet music.^[2] Sales by 1852 of 75,000 copies of Stephen Foster's "Massa's in the Cold Ground" was considered "phenomenal" since music publishers did not try to promote songs.^[3] The first song to became "popular" through a national advertising campaign was "My Grandfather's Clock" in 1876.^[3] Mass production of pianos in the late-19th century helped boost sheet music sales.^[3] Toward the end of the century, during the Tin Pan Alley era, sheet music was sold by dozens and even hundreds of publishing companies.^[4][5][6] The sheet music industry also suffered due to the considerable sale of pirated reprints^[7][8][9] and lead sheets.^[5]

Reports vary widely to confirm the first million-seller song in sheet music; examples include "When This Cruel War Is Over" (1863),^[10] "After the Ball" (by 1892 or 1893),^{[11][12][13][a]} and "Funiculì, Funiculà" in 1880.^[15][b] From 1900 to 1910, over one hundred songs sold more than a million copies.^[5] Various "hit songs" sold as many as two or three million copies in print.^[11][17] With the advent of the radio broadcasting, sheet music sales of popular songs decreased and print figures failed to make a significant recovery after the World War II (1940s).^[11] Exact figures are lacking, but in the 1950s, sheet music sales averaged 300,000 annually.^[18] By 1966, the United States House Committee on the Judiciary informed 100,000 copies of a title were "rares".^[19] "(How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window?" (1953) is believed to be the last song to sell one million of sheet music,^[20] from that era. American musicologist Barry Kernfeld, said that in the 1950s, "a million-selling sheet-music title was entirely a thing of the past".^[9]

From the album era, "Stairway to Heaven" (1971) by Led Zeppelin is the biggest selling piece of sheet music in rock history, with over one million copies sold, selling 15,000 units per year at some point.^[21] In the digital era, "My Immortal" became an early example of healthy sheet music downloads, becoming the all-time best-selling sheet music download at Musicnotes, with over 8,350 copies until June 2004, outpacing "A Thousand Miles"'s 7,137 sales.^[22] Occasionally, Billboard reported the best-selling folios and singles sheet yearly,^[23] or by music publishing companies.^[24][25]