Garth Brooks: The Man Who Outsold Elvis and Still Won't Let You Stream His Music

There is only one entertainer in American history who has outsold Elvis Presley in his own country, turned down Spotify and Apple Music on principle, sold over six million tickets on a single tour, and played a free concert for nearly a million people in Central Park. There is only one, and his name is Garth Brooks.

You Cannot Find Him on Spotify. That Is Entirely on Purpose.

If you open Spotify or Apple Music and search for Garth Brooks, you will come up mostly empty. No Friends in Low Places. No The Dance. No Rodeo. For the casual music fan, it is baffling. For Garth Brooks, it is a deliberate choice rooted in something he has felt strongly about for a long time.

Brooks flatly refused to license his catalog to streaming platforms for years, citing serious concerns about how those platforms compensate artists, particularly songwriters who receive only a fraction of the royalties they would earn from physical sales. When Spotify came calling, he listened and declined. When Apple came calling, he was equally unmoved. "They came in with their own set of rules," Brooks said of Apple. "I'm never going to change to fit their rules."

In 2016, Brooks signed an exclusive deal with Amazon Music, making it the only major streaming platform where his full catalog is available. The partnership gave him something the others could not: control. He wanted his albums experienced as complete works, not shuffled and cherry-picked by an algorithm. He even briefly launched his own streaming platform called GhostTunes in 2014, though it did not last long. What has lasted is his refusal to meet Spotify where it lives. While some fans find it frustrating, others see it as one more example of an artist who has never let the industry dictate his terms.

The Best-Selling Solo Artist in American History

Here is the number that stops people cold. According to the RIAA, Garth Brooks is the top-selling solo artist of all time in the United States, with 157 million certified albums, ahead of Elvis Presley and second only to The Beatles in total album sales overall. He is the first and only artist in RIAA history to have nine albums certified Diamond, meaning each one sold more than ten million copies. Nine of them. For context, most artists never achieve a single Diamond certification in their entire career.

He was also the first country artist to have three albums simultaneously in the Billboard 200's top 20. His 1991 album Ropin' the Wind made history as the first country record ever to debut at number one on the main Billboard chart, not just the country chart, the all-genre chart. In the 1990s, Garth Brooks did not just dominate country music. He dominated American music, full stop.

A Touring Record That Defies Comprehension

In 1997, Brooks headlined a free concert in Central Park dubbed Garthstock, drawing an estimated crowd of nearly one million people. It became the largest concert ever held in the park and was broadcast live on HBO, becoming the most-watched cable special of that year with 14.6 million viewers.

Two decades later, he did it again on an even larger scale. The Garth Brooks Stadium Tour launched in 2019 and sold over 6.3 million tickets, making it the biggest North American tour in history and the biggest American tour in the world. Since the tour began, Brooks broke stadium attendance records at nearly every stop, selling an average of 95,000 tickets per city. His largest single show was in Baton Rouge, where 102,000 tickets sold out in two hours, a crowd so loud during "Callin' Baton Rouge" that it registered as a small earthquake. Five sold-out nights in Dublin, Ireland closed the tour in September 2022, with 400,000 tickets selling out within four hours.

In a strong touring year, Brooks has been known to earn as much as $90 million and has at times been the highest-paid celebrity on the planet.

$400 Million and Counting

Brooks and his wife Trisha Yearwood have a combined net worth of $400 million, with the vast majority attributable to Garth himself. He has earned that fortune entirely on his own terms, without ever surrendering creative control to a platform, a trend, or anyone else's rules. He turned down streaming services when streaming was the future. He still outsells artists who are available everywhere.

Garth Brooks built the biggest solo sales record in American history before the internet existed and has protected it ever since. You may not be able to find him on Spotify, but he does not seem to be losing any sleep over it.

Read his full bio for all the details on Garth’s amazing career.