The most popular David Bowie album since the singer’s death on 10 January 2016 is Blackstar, according to the latest figures from the Official Charts Company. The compilers of the UK charts have put together top 10s for both Bowie’s album sales and singles sales over the last year, with Heroes topping the singles sales list.
Since his death, Bowie’s albums have managed combined sales of around 1.62m – including physical sales, downloads and streaming equivalents – while his singles have managed 1.87m combined sales. Heroes alone has been streamed 8.83m times since his death, and downloaded 50,000 times. It achieved its highest chart position of No 12 after his death.
It’s not surprising Blackstar should be the most popular Bowie album of the last year. It was released, to glowing reviews, on 8 January, just two days before he died, leading fans to treat it almost as a puzzle offering clues about his life and work. However, it’s perhaps more telling that the next three albums on the Official Charts Company’s list were all compilations – Best of Bowie, Nothing Has Changed: The Very Best Of and Legacy. Only after them do his other original albums feature, with the list dominated by his 70s classics.
Blackstar proved to be the best selling album on vinyl in the UK in 2016, with 54,000 copies. It was the sixth best selling album across all formats.
The list of bestselling songs is comprehensively dominated by older material. Lazarus – which appears on Blackstar, and also gave its name to the Bowie musical that opened in New York in 2015 and in London last year – features at No 9, but the second newest song in the top 10 is 1983’s Let’s Dance.
The full top 10s:
Albums
1. Blackstar
2. Best of Bowie
3. Nothing Has Changed: The Very Best Of
4. Legacy
5. Hunky Dory
6. The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars
7. Aladdin Sane
8. Low
9. The Next Day
10. Heroes
Tracks
1. Heroes
2. Life on Mars
3. Starman
4. Let’s Dance
5. Under Pressure (with Queen)
6. Space Oddity
7. Rebel Rebel
8. Changes
9. Lazarus
10. Ashes to Ashes