Question:  Ballad for Americans is a studio album of phonograph records by an American singer and actor whose sold how many records, tapes, compact discs and digital downloads?

Context articles: Bing Crosby
Harder, Fatter + Louder!
Gapless playback
Adaptations of Sherlock Holmes
Vitaphone
Zaireeka
BarlowGirl
Ballad for Americans (album)
Cuneiform Records
Record shop

Harry Lillis "Bing" Crosby Jr. ( ; May 3, 1903 – October 14, 1977) was an American singer and actor.
 Crosby's trademark warm bass-baritone voice made him the best-selling recording artist of the 20th century, having sold over one billion records, tapes, compact discs and digital downloads around the world.
Harder, Fatter + Louder!
 is a compilation album released November 22, 2010 by Fat Wreck Chords as the seventh volume in the label's "Fat Music" series.
 It marked the resumption of the series after an eight-year gap since 2002's "Uncontrollable Fatulence".
 During the intervening years Fat Wreck Chords had moved from compact discs toward digital downloads for its samplers, curtailing the "Fat Music" series and instead releasing compilation albums themed around social and political causes.
 These included the benefit albums "" (2003) and "" (2005), and the two volumes of "Rock Against Bush" released preceding the 2004 United States presidential election.
 "Harder, Fatter + Louder!"
 resumed the "Fat Music" series by featuring solely artists from the label's roster, with tracks selected from current and upcoming releases.
Gapless playback is the uninterrupted playback of consecutive audio tracks, such that relative time distances in the original audio source are preserved over track boundaries on playback.
 For this to be useful, other artifacts (than timing-related ones) at track boundaries should not be severed either.
 Gapless playback is common with compact discs, gramophone records, or tapes, but is not always available with other formats that employ compressed digital audio.
 The absence of gapless playback is a source of annoyance to listeners of music where tracks are meant to segue into each other, such as some classical music (opera in particular), progressive rock, concept albums, electronic music, and live recordings with audience noise between tracks.
The stories of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle were very popular as adaptations for the stage, and later film, and still later television.
 The four-volumes of the "Universal Sherlock Holmes" (1995) compiled by Ronald B. De Waal lists over 25,000 Holmes-related productions and products.
 They include the original writings, "together with the translations of these tales into sixty-three languages, plus Braille and shorthand, the writings about the Writings or higher criticism, writings about Sherlockians and their societies, memorials and memorabilia, games, puzzles and quizzes, phonograph records, audio and video tapes, compact discs, laser discs, ballets, films, musicals, operettas, oratorios, plays, radio and television programs, parodies and pastiches, children's books, cartoons, comics, and a multitude of other items — from advertisements to wine — that have accumulated throughout the world on the two most famous characters in literature."
Vitaphone was a sound film system used for feature films and nearly 1,000 short subjects made by Warner Bros. and its sister studio First National from 1926 to 1931.
 Vitaphone was the last major analog sound-on-disc system and the only one which was widely used and commercially successful.
 The soundtrack was not printed on the film itself, but issued separately on phonograph records.
 The discs, recorded at 33 ⁄  rpm (a speed first used for this system) and typically 16 in in diameter, would be played on a turntable physically coupled to the projector motor while the film was being projected, achieving a frequency response of 4300 Hz.
 Many early talkies, such as "The Jazz Singer" (1927), used the Vitaphone system.
 The name "Vitaphone" derived from the Latin and Greek words, respectively, for "living" and "sound".
Zaireeka is the eighth studio album by the alternative rock band The Flaming Lips.
 Released on October 28, 1997, the experimental rock album consists of four Compact Discs. Each of its eight songs consists of four stereo tracks, one from each CD.
 The album was designed so that when played simultaneously on four separate audio systems, the four CDs would produce a harmonic or juxtaposed sound.
 The discs can also be played in different combinations, omitting one, two or three discs.
 The album's title is a portmanteau of two words: "Zaire", chosen as a symbol of anarchy after Wayne Coyne heard a radio news story about the political instability of the African nation, and "eureka" (literally: "I have found it"), an expression of joyous discovery.
BarlowGirl was an American Christian rock–CCM all-female band from Elgin, Illinois.
 The band was composed of sisters Alyssa (lead vocals, bass, keyboard), Rebecca (backing vocals, guitar), and Lauren (co-lead vocals, drums) Barlow.
 The band is best known for its radio singles "Never Alone" in 2004 and "I Need You to Love Me" in 2006, breaking records for the longest-charting No. 1 song on the Radio and Records Christian Hit Radio (CHR) chart and obtaining millions of views for their music videos on YouTube.
 The band exceeded sales of one million compact discs by the end of 2008 and finished its career with over 1 million digital song downloads and 1.3 million compact disc sales.
Ballad for Americans is a studio album of phonograph records by Bing Crosby released in 1940 featuring the popular "Ballad for Americans" sung by Crosby in an American-type patriotic style.
 In 1946, the two records in this album were put into a new album called "What We So Proudly Hail".
 This was Crosby's first studio album that was not a reissue of earlier singles.
Cuneiform Records is an award-winning long-standing independent record label based in Silver Spring, Maryland, founded in 1984.
 Their catalog bridges the evolution from LP records to Compact Discs to digital downloads and back to LPs again.
A record shop or record store is a retail outlet that sells recorded music.
 In the late 19th century and the early 20th century, record shops only sold gramophone records, but over the 20th century, record shops sold the new formats that were developed, such as eight track tapes, compact cassettes and compact discs (CDs).
 Today in the 21st century, record stores sell CDs, vinyl records and in some cases, DVDs of movies, TV shows, cartoons and concerts.
 Some record stores also sell music-related items such as posters of bands or singers and even clothing and items such as bags and coffee mugs.