The 50 best-selling music artists of all time, ranked by platinum albums

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In today's music industry, the RIAA certifies an album as "platinum" when it surpasses 1 million album equivalent units in sales or streaming.
Here, we rank the best-selling artists of all time by their number of platinum album certifications.

In the decades before streaming-era rules and digital downloads inflated album sales, platinum certification was more difficult for artists to obtain.

When an artist achieved platinum status back then — selling a million or more physical copies of an album — it took a more fervent effort from fans (who had to drive to record stores, find an album, and hand over their hard-earned cash for it), but many acts nonetheless reached platinum certification routinely.

Compiling RIAA data, we ranked the best-selling artists of all time by the number of platinum albums they've sold in the US.

Some of the results here are surprising. Country singer Garth Brooks, for instance, has the most diamond (or 10-times platinum) albums of all time with seven. But the legendary acts at the top of the list are ones you'd expect to see.

Here are the 50 best-selling artists of all time, ranked by platinum albums sold: