The best-selling artists of the decade

AS the decade draws to a close, every music fan and his blog is rushing to coming up with a list of the best albums of the past 10 years (myself included - head to The Standard website's blog section to check it out).Critical opinions aside, another barometer of '00s success is sales figures. Some would say it's a more effective barometer, but no true music critic or fan worth his salt would dare suggest that Creed make good music by any form of measurement.Getting a worldwide list of the best-seller artists of all time is difficult for many reasons. Firstly, if you rely on record companies, you tend to end up with some highly inflated figures. Also, many charts around the world are calculated by how many albums are shipped to stores, not actually sold in stores.Secondly, compiling all the figures from more than 190 countries around the world is damned-near impossible.So the Americans, having the insular music industry that they do, released a list last week of the top-selling artists of the decade, but unfortunately the compilers (Nielsen/Soundscan) only counted sales in the US. Many news outlets ignored the 'US' bit, leading them to state that Eminem was the best-selling artist of the decade, ahead of The Beatles, with the implication that it was worldwide, without them necessarily saying so.That's why many of those news articles neglected to mention who was number three and four on the list, mysteriously stopping at the top two. This was because right behind Slim Shady and the Fab Four, according to Nielsen/Soundscan's list, are Tim McGraw and Toby Keith - two country artists whose CD sales outside the US could fit in the boot of a Volkswagon Beetle. At number five was Britney Spears.So who really is the biggest-selling artist of the decade worldwide?Trawling the web for such information is surprisingly difficult and compiling such stats would take months.One hard-working music fan posted a good-looking list on a UK music site message board which had the following top 10 (after much editing and assistance from other site users):1. Eminem: 75.8m 2. Britney Spears: 49.8m 3. Robbie Williams: 44.3m 4. The Beatles: 42m 5. Linkin Park: 41m 6. U2: 40.2 7. Coldplay: 39m 8. Madonna: 38.5m 9. Norah Jones: 38m 10. Michael Jackson – 38m This list makes a lot of sense, and reading through the message board there are a lot of figures to back it up.The top two are no surprise - it's hard to think about the past decade without Eminem and Britney figuring prominently.Robbie Williams is a bit of a surprise considering he didn't sell as many albums in the US as others on this list, but his popularity in the UK, Europe, Asia and Australia help make up for it.Many may have expected The Beatles to be higher, but their only massive-selling album this decade was hits collection 1. Their recent mass remastering rerelease of their old albums helped boost sales a litle.And rounding out the five, Linkin Park. Safe to say there are still a lot of angsty kids out there.As we leave this decade for the next, there are lots of things to wonder about. Will rap continue to be so dominant? How will downloads effect album sales? Will the album remain viable? Which artists will continue to be popular into the next 10 years? And which artists currently just emerging will prove to be the big-sellers?We'll just have to wait and see.