Prince sold more than a half-million albums since passing away suddenly Thursday, posthumously earning the late musician the two top spots on this week’s Billboard 200 chart.
Billboard announced Monday that “Very Best of Prince,” a 2001 greatest hits compilation, sold the equivalent of 179,000 albums during the week ending April 21, giving the artist his fifth album ever atop the Billboard 200 chart and his first in a decade.
The soundtrack to 1984’s “Purple Rain” sold 69,000 equivalent albums during that same span and ranked number two on Billboard’s list of best-selling records last week. According to Billboard, Prince is the first musician to simultaneously have the chart’s top two albums since rap artist Nelly in 2004.
Perhaps more astounding is that Billboard only accounted for sales and streams for the period ending the evening Prince passed away, meaning the musician managed to move the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of albums in a matter of hours.
The Billboard 200 ranks the week’s best-selling albums according to traditional album sales, track equivalent albums and streaming equivalent sales. Last week’s chart, dated May 7, will be published in full Tuesday.
Prince was found dead in his Chanhassen, Minnesota, estate Thursday at the age of 57. The Midwest Medical Examiners Office said that an autopsy was completed the following day, and that the results of a full death investigation could take several weeks.
Sales continued to surge throughout the weekend, with researchers at Nielsen reporting on Monday that Prince sold 579,000 albums during the previous three days, accounting for an 42,000 percent increase from the week prior when the artist was still alive.
Aside from the two top-selling albums, six other Prince records charted last week, including “The Hits/The B-Sides,” “1999,” “Ultimate,” “Sign ’O’ the Times,” “HITnRun: Phase One” and a self-titled album. As of Monday afternoon, Prince also was responsible for the nine best-selling albums on Amazon and the top four on iTunes, while an unauthorized, 320-album digital compilation listed on The Pirate Bay, a site that links to torrent files, ranked as the 15th-most popular download.
As Billboard acknowledged, the surge in legal sales in the wake of Prince’s passing could likely be attributed to the artist’s persistence with regards to having his music removed from unauthorized websites and services, specifically including The Pirate Bay, where several thousands of individuals were reportedly sharing the artist’s music in the immediate aftermath of his death last week, up from a “few dozen” a few days earlier, according to Torrent Freak.
Although Prince sued The Pirate Bay in 2007 for contributing to illegal music sharing, Torrent Freak said that an estimated 100,000 people had turned to the website for Prince’s music in the day following his death.
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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