Brian May and Roger Taylor say that they are "humbled and honoured" to have made UK chart history as Queen become the first artist to have an album pass seven million ‘sales’ in the UK.
The band's 1981 Greatest Hits collection, already the best-selling album of all time, having passed the six million sales mark back in 2014, has spent over 1000 weeks on the UK charts, and has now edged pass seven million 'sales', through a combination of physical sales, downloads and streams. Greatest Hits has notched up 1.26 billion total UK streams to date, with the album’s most-streamed track being Bohemian Rhapsody, which boasts 240 million UK streams and counting.
Speaking to OfficialCharts.com, Queen guitarist Brian May says: “We’re here to bring you the joyous news that Queen’s Greatest Hits album has sold 7 million copies, which nobody has ever done before. No album has done this before in history. Thank you, we appreciate it.”
Queen’s Roger Taylor adds: “The British public and their infinitely-great taste have made this the biggest-selling album in history. Thank you very much; we’re humbled and honoured. We salute you!”
Martin Talbot, Chief Executive of the Official Charts Company, has hailed the band for their "fantastic achievement", saying, "when it was released for the first time in 1981, career-spanning packages such as Greatest Hits were relatively rare, the preserve of only the very biggest acts.
"Queen’s Greatest Hits can claim to be in more than one-in-four UK 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 that they are today.”
