List of best-selling singles of the 1950s in the United Kingdom
Singles are a type of music release that typically have fewer tracks than an extended play or album; during the 1950s, sales of singles in the United Kingdom were compiled by the magazine "New Musical Express" ("NME"), and published weekly as a record chart. The singles chart was founded in 1952 by Percy Dickins of "NME", who wanted to imitate the hit parade that featured in the American magazine "Billboard"; before this, the popularity of a song had been measured by its sales of sheet music. Dickins sampled  twenty shops, asking which their ten biggest-selling singles were. His aggregated list of sales was then published in "NME" on 14 November 1952 as a Top 12 chart. "NME"'s chart is considered by the Official Charts Company (OCC) to be the canonical UK Singles Chart during the 1950s; it was expanded to a Top 20 on 1 October 1954. Sales of records significantly increased in the mid-fifties, following the birth of rock and roll. As a result, the top ten biggest-selling singles of the 1950s were all released in the latter half of the decade. The  biggest-selling single of this period was "Rock Around the Clock" by Bill Haley & His Comets, which became the first single ever to sell more than a million copies in the UK.