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This lists documents the world's best-selling music artists categorically and alphabetically. This information cannot be listed officially, as there is no organization that has recorded global music sales. 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 record labels, newspaper articles or manual addition of figures from various official sources. This means that these figures should be considered claims, not facts.
Constraints
Although the criteria for the following list are intended to be expansive (including comparisons for total sales for all recording artists) there are certain limitations and constraints that may limit the conclusions that can be derived from this data.
Such constraints include:
Bias towards acts who have had success in a specific country or region.
Bias towards older artists. There is now a broader genre spectrum of music to listen to now which limits the number of listeners.
Bias towards modern artists. Comparatively fewer successful modern artists will have sold more records, as both global spending power and population have increased. In 1950, the world's population was 2.5 billion; by 2000 it had risen to 6 billion. 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 experienced some loss 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).
Inconsistencies between the sources of the various statistics. For example in some cases world sales are compared to US (RIAA certifies US sales only).
Bowman, Edith (2007-05-26). "BBC World Visionaries: Madonna Vs. Mozart". BBC News. Retrieved 2008-05-12. In 2000, Guinness World Records listed Madonna as the most successful female recording artist of all time.
The liner notes of Marc: Songs from the Granada TV Series read, " Bolan, who has sold in the region of 200 million records with his group T.Rex, should generate a fair bit of excitement in Marc."
