Article snapshot taken from Wikipedia with creative commons attribution-sharealike license.
Give it a read and then ask your questions in the chat.
We can research this topic together.
You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in German. (May 2018) Click for important translation instructions.
View a machine-translated version of the German article.
Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Misplaced Pages.
Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 2,136 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization.
Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article.
You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing German Misplaced Pages article at ]; see its history for attribution.
You may also add the template {{Translated|de|Liste von Interpreten mit den meisten durch den BVMI zertifizierten Tonträgerverkäufen}} to the talk page.
This list includes music artists with at least five million record sales in Germany, based on certifications by the BVMI (Bundesverband Musikindustrie). Artists are ranked in descending order.
Awards are only presented if and when a record company applies for certification, it is not done automatically. Only records that were declared to and registered by the BVMI receive awards. The BVMI began its certifications in 1975, therefore popular artists from earlier eras are generally not represented on this list. This excludes artists such as Heintje Simons, Peter Alexander, Freddy Quinn, Caterina Valente, or the Rolling Stones, and may explain the lower-than-expected sales figures for pre-1975 artists like The Beatles. Certifications are based on a record's release date.
Video albums have been included since 1991 and streaming since 2016. Until 5 April 2018, a unit was equal to 1000 streams for albums and 100 streams for singles. Those numbers were raised to 2000 streams for albums and 200 streams for singles on 6 April of that year.