The UK’s Bestselling Artist Album Of All Time

The file that’s acknowledged by the Official Charts Firm because the UK’s bestselling artist album of all time, Queen’s first Biggest Hits assortment, started its reign on November 14, 1981. It’s gone on turn into the primary album in UK chart historical past to achieve 7 million UK chart “gross sales,” a milestone reached in recent times by the addition of downloads and streams to its huge whole as a bodily launch.

In 2014, the OCC had confirmed that Biggest Hits was the primary album to move gross sales in Britain of six million copies, some 900,000 copies forward, to February that yr, of ABBA’s Gold anthology. So as to add to the honour, the Biggest Hits II album, launched precisely a decade later in October 1991, only a month earlier than the premature demise of Freddie Mercury, stood at No.10 in that all-time gross sales listing, with an extra 3.9 million UK gross sales.

The primary Biggest Hits, launched just a little over seven and a half years into the band’s chart lifespan, and with their “Beneath Stress” collaboration with David Bowie simply seven days away from changing into Queen’s second chart-topping single, the retrospective gave them their third No.1 UK album. It had opened at No.2, behind British rock’n’curler Shakin’ Stevens’ Shaky, earlier than beginning the primary of 4 weeks on the high. The gathering additionally topped the charts on first launch in Germany, Holland and Austria amongst different markets.

Seen by many because the definitive hits assortment by any artist, it had by November 2022 risen to an astonishing combination of 1023 weeks within the weekly UK High 100, 343 of them spent contained in the High 40 and 56 within the High 10.

The hits package deal was within the High 5 each week till the tip of January 1982 and remained within the High 75 for nearly a yr, till the tip of September. It has reappeared at common intervals ever since, and as Queen’s legend grew, the album spent an unbroken run of 224 weeks on the High 100 between 1983 and 1987.

Hearken to the very best of Queen on Apple Music and Spotify.

Mercury’s unhappy demise did, after all, give Biggest Hits new momentum, with a nine-week sequence within the High 10 from late 1991 alongside its second quantity. The success of the Bohemian Rhapsody movie and its soundtrack propelled the gathering again into the UK High 30 as soon as once more and, within the digital period, it has spent its chart life from 2019 onwards again within the High 40, and infrequently greater. Few, if any, albums within the historical past of British music have been fairly so indispensable.

Purchase or stream Queen’s Greatest Hits.