Way ahead of any possible competition you can imagine, Eminem holds the title of the best selling rapper in the world.
Recently, Forbes updated its infamous list of the Top 50 best rappers. They placed Jay-Z at No.1 and Eminem at No.10, starting the entry about Marshall with “It’s hard to talk about the rap game today without mention of Eminem”. They did try hard, though, and managed to put him at the bottom of the Top 10 ranked by “critical acclaim, cultural influence, album sales, innovation in the genre and more”.
Meanwhile, at the end of the article was tucked the list of rappers ranked by their selling figures. And there, Eminem came first, with a gap between him and the second best, as big as the lifetime sales of some artists on the list.
1. Eminem: 61.5 million albums sold2. Tupac: 36.5 million3. Jay-Z: 33.5 million4. Drake: 33.5 million5. Kanye West: 27.5 million6. Lil Wayne: 25 million7. Beastie Boys: 23 million8. Outkast: 23 million
Mind you, these figures were sourced from the Recording Industry Association of America. This means they were updated for other artists, not for Eminem, whose most recent mass update occurred in March 2022. Em’s sales have risen since then, two years down the line. Yet, his unassailable dominance remains.
