Record sales
economic activity related to selling music recordings
Record sales or music sales are activities related to selling music recordings (albums, singles, or music videos) through physical record shops or digital music stores. Record sales reached their peak in 1999, when 600 million people spent an average of $64 on records, achieving $40 billion in sales of recorded music.
Record sales started declining in the 21st century, which made artists rely on touring for most of their income. By 2019, record sales accounted for less than half of global recorded music revenue, overtaken by streaming. Following the inclusion of streaming into record charts in the mid-2010s, record sales are also referred to as traditional sales or pure sales.
Although an accurate worldwide sales figure is hard to determine, it is widely acknowledged that the Beatles have sold more records than any other artist in history. Michael Jackson's studio album Thriller (1982) remains the best-selling album in history, while "White Christmas" (1942) performed by Bing Crosby is believed to be the best-selling single.
History
1870s–2000s: Physical era
Before the existence of recording medium and its player, the music industry earned profit through selling musical compositions on sheet music. The very first sales chart published by Billboard magazine in the United States was the Sheet Music Best Sellers chart. Following the invention of the phonograph, by Thomas Edison in 1877, the music industry began hiring singers to record songs made by composers.
“Record sales” enters the record as economic activity related to selling music recordings. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what sales, economic and activity can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Record sales” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, sales, economic and activity provides the most credible route into that argument.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q29585593. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1999, 2019, 1982 and 1942.
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This entry incorporates text from “Record sales” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.