QUEEN'S GREATEST HITS 7M

Queen’s Greatest Hits (EMI) has become the first album to top 7 million in U.K. chart sales. The 1981 collection hit that number via a combination of physical sales, downloads and streams.

The compilation has accumulated 1.26b U.K. streams to date, with “Bohemian Rhapsody” accounting for 240m of the total, the Official Charts Company has announced.

Back in the pre-streaming days of 2014, Queen’s Greatest Hits was the first album to surpass 6m sales in the U.K.

“When it was released for the first time in 1981, career-spanning packages were relatively rare, the preserve of only the very biggest acts,” Official Charts Company CEO Martin Talbot said. “Queen’s Greatest Hits can claim to be in more than one in four U.K. households’ record collections today, and there is no doubt that its massive success has done as much as any other release to turn hits packages into the omnipresent album concept they are today.”