List of biggest selling British acts of all time

Constraints

• Bias towards acts who have had success in a specific country or region.
• Bias towards older artists. There is a broader genre spectrum of music to listen to now which limits the number of listeners.
• Bias towards modern artists. Comparatively fewer successful pre-modern artists will have sold more records, as both global spending power and population have increased. In 1950, the world's population was 2.5 billion; by 2000 it had risen to 6 billion. Also, older artists suffer from bias as their record sales are less likely to have been accurately tracked, and estimates of their early sales are likely to be more vague.
• Fan sites, press articles and record labels have been known to inflate record sales claims.
• Inflated claims for artists who performed in different acts during their careers. Sometimes all of the sales data is attributed to an individual artist. For the purposes of this list, an effort is made to separate the individual acts.

  400 million or more records

300 million to 400 million records

200 million to 299 million records

100 million to 199 million records

50 to 99 million records