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We Will Rock You just joined the 1B club. Queen now has 5 songs with over 1B streams on Spotify.
That’s just incredible how this band keeps breaking all sorts of records. I would think radio ga ga and we are the champions would be next and not far off ?
Yes, the main version has just passed 1B but if you take all versions of WWRY (which we do on here) it passed 1B some time ago. It currently sits on 1,055,715,830.
Tony, no it's I Want To Break Free that will be next in line, then Somebody to Love
I Want To Break Free 920m
Somebody To Love 787m
We Are The Champions 712m
Killer Queen 637m
Radio Ga Ga 621m
Crazy Little Thing Called Love 580m
I’m on Amazon prime, are they separate figures from Spotify or all lumped together?
Yes, it's a completely different platform and will have it's own numbers. That 920m is solely streams on Spotify. Unfortunately Amazon Music (which I also use) just has popularity bars, so there is no way of directly telling exactly how many streams a song or artist has on that platform.
To work around this, an equation has been developed to calculate streams from platforms that do not give streaming numbers for song and artists. This allows us to gain a comprehensive worldwide streaming total, based on market shares etc.
If you check the most recent Frank Sinatra streaming masters article https://chartmasters.org/streaming-masters-frank-sinatra/ you can see the equation is listed. Also if you look at the figures in the tables, you can see the Spotify total is then followed by a comprehensive total. So the first track "You Go To My Head" has 7.3m streams on Spotify but once the equation is used it gives us a comp worldwide total of 13m.
And still 3 songs in 2022's top 20 from the 20th century (credit to Thomas) :
Kate Bush – Running Up That Hill 770m
Coolio – Gangsta's Paradise 354m
Queen – Bohemian Rhapsody 339m
Nirvana – Smells Like Teen Spirit 339m
Mariah Carey – All I Want For Christmas Is You 332m
The Police – Every Breathe You Take 319m
Tears For Fears – Everybody Wants To Rule The World 299m
Guns N' Roses – Sweet Child O' Mine 291m
Queen – Don't Stop Me Now 289m
Dr. Dre – Still D.R.E. 289m
A-ha – Take On Me 286m
Goo Goo Dolls – Iris 268m
Eagles – Hotel California 267m
Michael Jackson – Billie Jean 258m
Radiohead – Creep 255m
Wham – Last Christmas 253m
Journey –Don't Stop Believin’ 253m
Fleetwood Mac – Dreams 251m
Queen – Another One Bites The Dust 250m
Oasis – Wonderwall 248m
For an act that formed in the early '70s Queens' streaming performance is absolutely out of this world. There are a lot of newer acts that would kill for those numbers...
Yes, their numbers are very, very impressive for such an old act. I think the remaining members have been very astute in keeping their music alive, helping it grow and promoting it to new(er) audiences, through various avenues such as Bo Rhaps inclusion in Waynes World, the We Will Rock You musical, continuing to play their music live, lending a lot of their tracks to advertising and obviously the insanely successful movie.
Queen now have eight albums over a billion streams. Ridiculous numbers for an act that debuted in the early 70's...
Impressive but not as much as The Beatles, who in the next month or two should have 9 albums over 1b, not to mention the 2b streams from "orphan" songs (Hey Jude...etc.), their late arrival on Spotify (12/2015), their last album recorded in the 60s...
Absolutely. The Beatles numbers are also outstanding. Of all comparably sized discographies, they probably have the most consistent back catalogue in terms of hits per album.
As it mentions on one of the pages, before people even knew a Queen movie was going to be made, this website mentioned that Queen would overtake Madonna, even if she released another album. So it wasn't only about the movie. They would've overtaken her anyway.
Looks like Queen are selling their music catalogue for around 1 billion dollars.
https://blabbermouth.net/news/queens-music-catalog-could-sell-for-over-1-billion-this-year
Queen's Greatest Hits has just received its 24th Platinum Award in the UK for sales in excess of 7,200,000. It is widely accepted that GH had its sales inflated in 2006 with 560,000 and 66,000 (626,000) sales added from The Platinum Collection and GH1&2 respectively.
However people are now stating that GH's continues to have additional sales added to it from TPC. I was under the impression that the added sales was a one off event and no further sales have ever been added from either of the aforementioned releases.
Can anyone confirm this? even with the 626,000 sales taken off GH still remains the UK's biggest selling album ever.
Best selling albums in the UK according to Chartmasters :
ABBA - Gold 5.80m
Queen - Greatest Hits 5.37m
Adele - 21 5.27m
Oasis - What's The Story 5.12m
Michael Jackson - Thriller 4.76m
In all honesty I've completely lost track of what is included in it's total and what is not. The OCC, especially with albums that featured in the 2006 Best Selling UK albums list, have made such as mess of things over the years, which has unfortunately also filtered through to the BPI and their automatic certification process.
Did they sell 206 million or over 300 million records? Cause every source says something different.
Chartmasters Queen 278,487,000 most accurate figure worldwide. 4th biggest selling artist worldwide and 2nd Biggest ever selling Band, only second to the Beatles.
So that means that Taylor Swift sold more than them? Well, damn. What a let down.
A few page said 315 million though.
If you want to equalize a digital download to an album sale, then Wikipedia is the place to go to
Clockingbell said it perfectly. If you want to put on the same level someone who goes to a record shop to buy a full-length album with another one who sits behind his smartphone to download a single track, then go to read and believe the Wikipedia article "List of best-selling music artists". But here at Chartmasters different formats are treated differently. I guess it's simply logical, isn't it?
What are "pure copies" for you? You seem to have misunderstood my previous post. It doesn't make sense to discuss about "selling records, copies etc." Once again: There are different formats: physical album, physical single, download, stream etc. Do you want to lump everything one on one together and then talk about "records sold"? I'll say it again because it seems you haven't understood yet:
Different formats must be treated differently!
Queen have sold far more physical albums than Taylor Swift, who in turn has sold more downloads and streams. Physical album sales are worth more than physical singles, which in turn are worth more than single track downloads. So, it makes no sense to lump everything together and then (like you) talk about "records, copies etc. sold". But different formats can be weighted (as is done here in Chartmasters) then you get a value of Equivalent Album Sales (EAS). At the moment Queen have about 278M EAS while Taylor Swift has about 150M EAS.
To use EAS is indeed indicative of an artist's success relative to other artists. If you continue to talk about "records, copies sold" without differentiating them, then it's completely meaningless in terms of analyzing an artist's commercial success!
Okay.
What about US sales? Does anyone know if they passed LED Zeppelin in sales(worldwide)?
