Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of best-selling music artists

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 195.93.21.1 (talk) at 16:11, 21 August 2005. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

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  • Delete. This 'article' is, by far, the worst one on Wikipedia. Frankly, its getting out of hand. The figures are exaggerated and unreliable (there is no worldwide tracking system for sales) the page is vandalised incessantly. Many users take the page as a 'fansite' or forum, and they come here everyday and make false numbers and change the list to suit their artists. Really, what kind of article is this if its so unrealiable, people have to do their own research so that they can check if this article is accurate? At times, I want to revert the vandalism, but the page is so destroyed, I dont know the correct version to revert it to. Journalist (talk · contribs)

*Keep Gilgamesh he 07:36, 18 August 2005 (UTC) [reply]

Any reasons in particular?
  • Delete ProhibitOnions 14:43:43, 2005-08-18 (UTC) The page is near-useless as a reference, and the fact that it lacks a methodology makes it prone to inflated fan figures, which are highly partisan. Similar non-scientific articles, particularly Biggest-selling female musician (Note: also marked for deletion), which repeats the same exaggerated fan claims, must also be deleted.
  • Delete as i already mentioned to you on the discussion page there is no reliable "methodology" everything that was suggested by yourself and others was just as faultless, if not more so. Also, are sales that importnat in "music" anyway? We can celebrate a musicains carrer in their articles, regardless of how many albums/singles/candy bars that they have sold 195.93.21.1
  • Delete, I say delete it until there's a better way to verify cd sales
  • Keep. There is no way to verify record sales, estimates are all that is available. -user:Fallout_boy
  • <Comment from Talk>. Well, thank you very much guys for votes for deletion of this list. Now i understand that i was 100% right when i left a Wikipedia. My biggest contibution now will be destroyed. Thank you again ! Vorash 15:21, 19 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • Abstain. In one sense this article is unfixable. To do it right, you'd have to have reliable worldwide data (doesn't exist), a better wiki table formatting/numbering mechanism (doesn't exist), a real database query mechanism for the stats (doesn't exist), and no vandals (too many exist). Vorash spent tons of time and effort on this list, but eventually he was driven insane and left Wikipedia. On the other hand, even if you delete this article, someone else will create one down the road, and it won't be as good as the one Vorash put together before he left. Minus the vandalism, and with all the necessary qualifications that were given, the article did have some merit, in that it gave an order of magnitude idea of who sold a really lot of records and who didn't sell so much. Sometimes fuzzy data is all you have to work with. Wasted Time R 15:37, 19 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete, There is no way to verify, or know exactly who sold the most CDs, so therefore it is an estimate. Until we can verify it, and know exactly who sold many CDs, this article should be deleted.-User:jfriedman11746
THERE WILL NEVER BE A WAY TO VERIFY RECORD SALES. Especially on older releases, sales were never recorded, and even recent releases are difficult to keep track of sales. user:Fallout boy
  • Delete --AVainio 12:19, 20 August 2005 (UTC) Many of the accounts are false. Annie Lennox has sold 50 million? Maybe, but her own webpage states that her two albums have sold 12 million copies. Ok, maybe the 50 million (mentioned in some Live8 materials) could take into account the sales from Eurythmics. If so, why does Eurythmics have 80 million albums sold. That is just one example. These figures will never make sense. Just too little accuracy and too many wild, opinionated guesses thrown around.[reply]
  • Delete --Woodchuck96 No validity, insane numbers, almost no accuracy - all in all, an horrid article which is a shame for Wikipédia.
  • Delete - Besides the American/Euro-centric nature of the artists mentioned, there just aren't many resources to validate the numbers. For example, I remember news of Coldplay selling in the range of 20 million records at the beginning of the year. Just weeks before the release of X&Y, EMI give press releases claiming that the band has now sold 25+ million records. I doubt a band can sell 5 million records (in just 6 months) globally between releases.... in other words, the labels put their own spin on the numbers whenever they need to promote an act. --Madchester 01:26, August 21, 2005 (UTC)
  • Delete, evens sales info from the RIAA is as unreliable as anything, it is not a 100% truth.
  • Keep - This holds a lot of estimates on artist sales, and the article itself says that the information is suspect. However, this page is still a reliable reference (and is probably the best reference available in the world because the sources are so varied and averaged) People still have a ned to find out whereabouts famous artists are on this list, and there is no other place on the internet where you can find results tabled like this, which regularly get updated. If you're going to delete this, you might as well burn older school atlases "Because they're unreliable", as well as delete a significant amount of wikipedia. Those areas would be places like biblical references (only one reference), theories and death tolls. Wikipedia is a place to pool all the information on the internet, so why not keep it that way? --Mahogany h00r 19:35, August 21, 2005 (GMT+12)
  • Keep There are no doubt a lot of mistakes on this list. However there will always be mistakes on these kinds of lists. Even recordlabels are often promoting artists by quoting much larger recordsales than the actual numbers to boost sales and make an image. However I think this list is as good as it gets. In adittion to " offical numbers there are also numbers for bootlegrecordings and so on. These kinds of list will never be accurate. However they give an general idea.

I have also noticed that a lot of posters only talks about US sales. This is OK, since it's the only country who has an official statistic. However it does'nt mean that there is'nt a world outside the US with 6 billion people. Just because an artists has sold 2 million in the US, does'nt mean that they haven'nt sold 40 million in the rest of the world.

It is also noted on the list that: In general there is no official organization that certifies worldwide record sales (such as the RIAA does for U.S. record sales). Thus, there are few if any reliable figures to go into this list. Fans, biographers, and record lables may overestimate sales figures for publicity purposes. Many of bestselling artists from Asia, Africa and Latin America are still not included because of the lack of data. Thus, the list cannot be considered definitive, and should be taken with a large grain of salt.

I think that is good enough warnig. If we delete this list, we might as well delete all the bio's as well. Proabably a lot of mistakes there too. Soon we wont have a lexica at all............ ( User: MNorge1978 )

Comment. Careful now, saying that removing this project page will also lead to the deletion of artist bios is a slippery slope argument. Artist pages like Radiohead and Coldplay are all respectable, even with no details of total album sales. --Madchester 15:01, August 21, 2005 (UTC)
  • Keep I mostly agree with the comments below (I am still laughing about the 5 billion sales proposed for Cher). However, I think it would be better to reach a consensus about what kind of estimations may or may not be used. After all there are albums made gold or diamond regularly, which means that some estimations are indeed accurate. I propose to keep the article, indicate each time what kind of source is used, and reach a consensus about which of these sources are reliable (and delete the entries that are clearly not). User: Nyco
  • Come off it, there is NO CONSENSUS that is FACT. Just because albums are "certified" for sales, doesn't make it "more reliable". Album certifications rely a lot on what the record label say. Unless someone from the certification company (I.E the RIAA) has PERSONALLY COUNTED every copy of the record, even those statistics should be taken with a pinch of salt and NOT given credit as facts. If the RIAA's figures were so accurate, their certification of sales wouldn't be such a mess, i.e Led Zeppelin suddenly going up from "50 million" to "106 million" since 1990. It's complete fabrication.
  • Delete It's shoddy, downright shoddy, and should not be tolerated. Agamemnon2
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