This Is the Artist Who Sold the Most Songs Online

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Feb 7, 11:05AM EST · Published Feb 6, 9:25AM EST

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This Is the Artist Who Sold the Most Songs Online — © Kevin Winter / Getty Images

The LP (long-playing) record was first available commercially in 1948. For years, it was the primary way that Americans listened to music. It began to be replaced by the CD (compact disc) in the early 1980s. At about the same time, Sony introduced the Walkman, a portable music player.

The next major evolution of how people listened to music was iTunes, Apple’s allowed people to listen to content stored electronically. In 2013, Russ Crupnick, NPD’s senior vice president of industry analysis, made the comment that “Since the launch of Apple’s iTunes store, digital music downloads have become the dominant revenue source for the recorded-music industry, and iTunes continues to be the dominant retailer.”

The fact that the great majority of people listen to music online has changed the world for the artists who produce it.

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24/7 Tempo picked the artist with the best-selling digital singles from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). For context, sales data on digital singles has been collected by the RIAA since 2004 and there are 422 artists with at least 5 million certified units in the category. We included a popular single for each artist we considered using Billboard Hot 100 chart data. All data is as of January 2022.

2021 has been an increasingly big year for a few of the artists on this list reinforcing their drive and current relevance. For example, Drake’s WIN of the “Top Streaming Songs Artist” award and Lady Gaga’s WIN of the “Top Dance/Electronic Artist” award at the 2021 Billboard Music Awards.

Moreover, in the continuing pandemic, some artists like Ed Sheeran (who contracted COVID-19 last year), persevered with home performances and a new album release in the fall of 2021.

The artist who sold the most music online is Drake. Here are the details:

> Digital singles: 163.5 million
> Single with the longest run on the Billboard Hot 100 chart: “Hotline Bling” (36 weeks)
> “Hotline Bling” peaked on chart: April 23, 2016

Click here to see all the artists with the most songs online.
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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.