the artist with the largest catalog made me start thinking about which artist i have the most music of:

mine has got to be the CSNY total output.

someday i will count them all, but i' m guessing close to 100 with all the incarnations.

Only a guess, but I would say the Rolling Stones or Jethro Tull.

Would be the Beatles if they'd hung around longer.

Oddly enough, Nat King Cole. He was quite prolific.

My CD collection software has a statistics option in it that makes answering something like this easier.

Chicago - 63
Elton John - 57
Paul McCartney - 45
Elvis Costello - 43
Queen - 40
U2 - 38
Meat Loaf - 38
Pet Shop Boys - 38
David Bowie - 34
...and on.

Of course this includes all kinds of CDs, including CD singles.

Zappa...everything on vinyl and cd.
All releases as guest.
Over 150 boots from long ago.
Over 800 concerts and rehearsals on cassette and car.
Still not enough.

Sets... neil young
Individual discs... widespread panic

I have about sixty Beach Boys discs. Of course this includes all the remasters and greatest hits, etc., as well as nine separate and individual versions of Pet Sounds. I'm so ashamed.

1 by a mile: Duke Ellington

2. Grateful Dead

3. a tie of a ton of artists.

Prince, by far with all the "leaked albums" out there in addition to studio releases, followed by Morrissey thanks to a ton of live bootlegs (unless bootlegs don't count, in which case both of these are wrong and I'd have to go digging. )

Miles Davis and Coltrane are probably close. Maybe a hundred or so of each. Then Morrissey and The Smiths with sixty some including singles and boots.

Beach Boys. Apparently they're the meaning of life, since I have 42 CDs of theirs.

Second place is The Smithereens, largely thanks to their 21-disc Mega Box.

EDIT: Actually, Elvis Costello is 2nd. I forgot that the Rhino reissues were 2-disc.

Hard to answer this, since you could count multi-disc sets by the number of discs contained or count the number of albums contained on a twofer/three-on-two package separately. If you have multiple multi-disc versions of a title where one or more of the bonus disc(s) is/are different, do you count by title and say one, count by package and say three or count by discs within all packages and say seven? Pet Shop Boys are a good example of the extreme. By title, I have 29; by package, 36; by disc, 67. Throw in the CD singles, and the total is 91. Wanna add DVDs and DVD singles? Then it’s 98. But I basically consider myself to own 29. Other than PSB, I’m not going to count, so my response is based mostly on gut feeling and amount of shelf space they each take up.

The order might be off a bit, but this is my likely top 10 artists:
1. Diana Ross (Supremes and solo)
2. Brian Wilson (Beach Boys and solo)
3. Paul McCartney (Beatles, Wings and solo)
4. Elton John
5. Rod Stewart
6. Olivia Newton-John (incl. soundtracks)
7. Chicago
8. Pet Shop Boys
9. Donna Summer
10. Pointer Sisters (group and solo projects)

Heart, U2, Paul Young (Q-Tips, Streetband, Los Pacaminos and solo), Kim Wilde, Paul Carrack, Kim Carnes and Dusty Springfield would be in the conversation for the next few slots.

Probably Paul Weller. This year marked 40 years of material. Good grief.

Pink Floyd and The Stranglers for me.

Counting boots:

Beach Boys
Beatles
Pink Floyd
ELP/Nice (including all of Keith Emerson's soundtrack work)
Kraftwerk

Mike Oldfield and Jeff Beck would be the people I have the most stuff by (with Al Di Meola in third place).

Cool surprise, Al Di Meola.

I guess it's the Stones, especially considering that I have multiple pressings of many of their albums (couldn't bear to trade in older CDs when I bought reissues/remasters). And I kept the LPs too. Boots, imports, promos, box sets....

Miles - everything up through 1984s Decoy
Ellington - nearly everything
Basie - all through 1965 or so
Hank Mobley - all, including all sideman
Lee Morgan - all, including all sideman
Chick Corea - nearly all
Herbie Hancock - all through his Columbia period
All Mosaic black boxes except for nine
Nearly every Blue Note CD release
Wagner - all 13 operas
Sviatoslav Richter - at least 120+
Vladimir Horowitz - all the box sets
Glenn Gould - the giant Columbia box

Genesis, XTC, Tull, Radiohead, Tori Amos, Stephan Micus....

Damm, I wished you lived on the FL West Coast, I would come for a visit.

Fantastic collection!

Going just by shelf space use, not surprisingly #1 is Jethro Tull, but Van Morrison, Rush, Yes & the Who all receive honorable mention.