Ron,

See the Songography on the BING magazine site. It will give you all the info you need. There were about 1500 commercial recordings if you ignore alternate takes and singalong medleys.

Ron Field wrote:

I thought that Bing recorded something like 2700 or so commercial recordings and in all sang about 6000 titles.
Australian tenor - Peter Dawson - is the only other (I believe) recording artist to have matched Bing's commercial recording output, roughly the same number.
But, this would be a pretty big project.

Ron

I think that by 'recording artist' we must narrow down to the recorded voice, as I suspect that many jobbing instrumentalists, and possibly even band leaders and conductors, can produce very impressive numbers of recordings over very long careers.
 
There are very many complications in doing a count of recordings - for example do you count a single track containing a medley of three songs as one or three? How do you classify takes? A few are so distinctive they might be counted separately but others are very hard to distinguish. Where do you place the titles recorded in the studio for interpolation into radio shows?

However, I have done a very unscientific and likely to be very error-prone computerised count of key words in the 'Songography'. The major qualification is that the key words might appear elsewhere in the text or are not precisely used in a few instances. The conclusions which follow therefore are 'ballpark' approximations rather than precise counts. If someone else wants to do a precise manual count please go ahead!

Studio Recordings 2629 (Qualification - this will include all listed alternate takes and each song title in a medley will be counted as one so counting one track several times over).
Of this total 205 appear to be studio recordings for radio and there are 264 song titles included as part of medleys.

Radio performances 7064 (Qualification - Many are the same title repeated on several or even many occasions and some might be the same recording used again. The figure will include some advertising jingles and repeated signature tunes).

Film recordings 412 (Qualification - this includes numerous reprises and fragmentary items)

TV  Shows 1211 (Qualification -includes many a cappella fragments sung as part of anecdotes in interviews)

Whilst the count is primarily of songs there is no distinction between them and the small number of narrative recordings.

I repeat and re-emphasise that I used crude methods - the figures are probably only likely to be 85 -90% accurate (and that in itself is only a guess).

Any comparison with others is plagued by other problems. Peter Dawson had a recording career longer than Bing's (1906 to 1961 - 55 years) and in his earlier years is reputed to have recorded a great deal under assumed names (or no names at all), only some of which are known for certain, and estimates of the number vary, but reported figures for him seem to incline to larger numbers than Bing's STUDIO recordings. When total activity is brought into the picture I'm sure that positions are very different. I remember an attempt at a discography in a music magazine many years ago but I haven't been able to put my hands on it and I have a memory that it might only have been of electrical recordings. A search on the internet is surprisingly unproductive.

But neither can come close to some of the more recent 'Bollywood' stars, several of whom are reputed to have recorded 20,000 titles and one of whom (Asha Bhosle) claims 50,000 recorded over six decades. I'd like to see the songographies - or on second thoughts  - - -

And then you have the classical singers, particularly Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Joan Sutherland who have also made phenomenal numbers of recordings over long careers. But then I don't know how you compare an hour of oratorio or two hours of opera with any count of popular songs.