The world's best-selling music artists cannot be listed officially, as there is no organization that has recorded global music sales in the manner that the RIAA does in the United States. This page lists those artists who have had claims made to be among the top sellers.
Within their sales brackets, artists are listed in alphabetical order, rather than by number of records sold. Equal weight is given to album and single sales, as well as paid downloads. Sources are typically fan sites, record labels, newspaper articles or manual addition of figures from various official sources. This means that these figures should be considered claims, not facts.
Contents
1Possible biases of this page
2World's best seller
3Artists claimed to have sold 500 million records or more
4Artists claimed to have sold 250 million records or more
5Artists claimed to have sold 100 million records or more
6Artists claimed to have sold 75 million records or more
7Artists claimed to have sold 50 million records or more
8See also
9References
Possible biases of this page
Bias towards acts who have had success in the United States. The RIAA tracks and certifies sales for recordings sold in, or originating from, the United States, the world's largest single music market. While the RIAA's method and scope are exhaustive in this respect, figures for recordings produced and sold in other nations are not included, or at best are incomplete, in RIAA statistics. Since there are few authoritative or comprehensive counterparts to the RIAA which track the international music market, the RIAA's more certain sales figures tend to inflate the relative importance of the American market.
Bias towards modern artists. Comparatively less successful modern artists will have sold more records, as both global spending power and population have increased (even though most of the world reside in poorer countries that buy little or no music). In 1950, the world's population was 2.5 billion; by 2000 it had risen to 6 billion.[1] Also, older artists suffer from bias as their record sales are less likely to have been accurately tracked, and estimates of their early sales are likely to be more vague.
Bias towards older artists. Particularly, those artists who began their recording careers since 1990 may have suffered in sales from illegal downloading of tracks.
Fan sites, press articles, certification authorities and record companies have been known to inflate record sales claims.
Inflated claims for artists who performed in different acts during their careers. Sometimes all of the sales data is attributed to an individual artist. For the purposes of this list, an effort is made to separate the individual acts (e.g., the sales figures for The Beatles and Paul McCartney & Wings are mutually exclusive).
The best-selling musical act in history cannot and will probably never be known. U.S. sales data before 1952 are incomplete. International sales, particularly in the developing world, are still often poorly tracked, and much sales data before the 1980s are rare or dubious. The Beatles, Michael Jackson, and Elvis Presley have all been given the title by various sources. Less common claims are made for a number of other artists.
Artists claimed to have sold 500 million records or more
