Top Best-selling Music Artists

Who is the World's best-selling music artist? Interesting to know, is it Elvis Presley, The Beatles, Michael Jackson or Garth Brooks?

According to the RIAA ( Recording Industry Association of America ) website the answer is...

1. The Beatles ( 177 million certified units )
2. Elvis Presley ( 134.5m )
3. Garth Brooks ( 134m )
4. Led Zeppelin ( 111.5m )
5. Eagles ( 100m )
6. Billy Joel ( 81.5m )
7. Michael Jackson ( 75.5m )
8. Pink Floyd ( 74.5m )
9. Elton John ( 73m )
10. AC/DC ( 71.5m )

( Barbra Streisand comes in at 11th as the first woman with 71.5 million certified units ).

It has to be acknowledged that the US market is the biggest and that's where the top sellers are likely to gain their sales. Worldwide sales will lag behind. However this doesn't tell the whole story. This data from the US market only counts albums. Double albums count twice. Artists like Presley are penalised as his sales include many singles and double albums too short in running time to count as two. Adjusting for these factors, Presley rises to first, followed by the Beatles, then Brooks.

Extending the matter to include worldwide sales we have to consider that Presley and the Beatles are more popular than Brooks around the globe. So they will pull ahead with Michael Jackson also gaining ground on the others due to his global popularity. Michael Jackson is initially hindered by being a Motown artist early in his career, a label that did not audit for RIAA cetification to the same extent. That's why he doesn't appear in the RIAA top 5.

Record companies are not going to audit everything and certified sales are much less than actual sales. This is where it gets interesting as Elvis Presley appears to be the biggest seller, with 600 million sales in the US followed by 400 million elsewhere according to this Presley website. What this article does is spell out statistical failings when it comes to measuring how many records Presley has sold.

[ edit to add: just in case I'm failing to make the point, the year after Elvis Presley died several record pressing plants went over to making Presley records full time and they did this for the whole year. Presley went to number one on the country charts and stayed there for a long time. None of these sales were recorded, they were so busy, they simply forgot ]

Michael Jackson jumps into the 500-750 million bracket based on the following article from The New Yorker which asks the question whether Jackson's album Thriller sold 100 million and whether Jackson has reached a billion across everything he has done. We find out that he hasn't, Thriller is short of 100 million by 35 to 40 million ( that's over 60 million copies sold, a massive achievement ) and in total before he died he sold 440 million along with 75 million after his death for a total of 515 million units sold so far. Jackson then enters the top rank with MTV estimating his total sales at 750 million.

What of the Beatles I hear you say. First, let's dispense with the 2 billion claims by fans of both the Beatles and Presley. If both claims were true and with currently a billion people living in the developed world, there would have to be 2 Beatles and 2 Presley records sold for everyone in existence - man, woman and child. Take the average household being 3, that means 12 records for each household. Well, I haven't bought one, have you ? That means to make up for me someone else has to buy 8 and their household would have to buy 24. So we can safely dismiss these claims as grossly inflated ( bear in mind that the population was much lower when Presley and the Beatles were at their height ).

Billboard put the Beatles worldwide sales in 1972 at 545 million. If they'd stayed together and not gone their separate ways then it would be safe to assume their sales would have doubled since then. But they didn't and I'm going to apply a watering down effect. Sales which could have gone to the Beatles have instead gone to John Lennon or Paul McCartney's separate efforts. Legal wrangles also prevented Beatles tunes being released post their break-up in 1970. So I'm multiplying their 545 million by 1.6 to arrive at 872 million in total for them.

Garth Brooks is popular in the USA but less so elsewhere. Balancing this are digital sales from his website. The total for Garth Brooks I'm going to tie with Michael Jackson.

The biggies then are...

1. Elvis Presley ( more than a billion sales worldwide )

2. The Beatles ( 800-900 million sales worldwide )

3= Garth Brooks & Michael Jackson ( 500-750 million worldwide each ).

What about Bing Crosby?
He dominated music sales for a long time back in the 30's. 40's and 50's. But I found no evidence he could rival the big four above. I'm placing him in the sub 500 million category along with everyone else on the RIAA list at the top of this post ( the RIAA was established in the late 50's and so does not do Bing Crosby justice ).

Bear in mind this is just a numbers game. Each artist has made massive contributions to popular culture and I am not saying one is better than the other. They're all good, it's just nice to know who is top. Purely ancedotal evidence I know but I've travelled around the world and found Presley the only artist known by literally everyone, and they can all sing one of his tunes. We don't hear so much about Presley these days, maybe we need to give him his due.