In terms of the industry's perspective of success where does Prince stand?
According to the WSJ (8/2) Nielsen Soundscan concluded hits are the driving force in the business. None of Billboard's all-time best sellling albums were released in the past few years. One expl. is the older albums have been on sale longer.(ie; Pink Floyd "Dark Side Of The Moon" which continues to sell 9,600 records weekly in domestic sales alone.)
When determining best-selling music artists there are biases from record co.,
press, fan sites, etc. Thus far Prince, according to Wikipedia has sold 100 mil. records. The three top sellling artists are Beatles, MJ, and Elvis. What's the org's viewpoint? Anyone have access to absolute stats??

The absolute stats are hard to find, and then are debatable, the record industry does not seem to have kept a perfect record consistently through the years. And then you get into the argument about whether figures are based on records shipped or actually sold, and then each country has it's own record keeping system so global sales are even harder to add up, etc etc.

That being said, the RIAA list for the USA (which measures success in terms of half-millions sold) is a good starting place. Not wanting to get into it all over again, here's a thread where we discussed the issues:

http://www.prince.org/msg/7/195938

Not sure whether Prince really has quite achieved 100 million records worldwide, even including all the singles sales as well, but there's no doubt not least because of his long career he has been mightily successful.

i dont care about industry stats no offense im sure its a mightily fascinating topic