Prince Song Sales: Why Is 'Purple Rain' Singer's Music Selling More After His Death? [PHOTO]
Following his tragic death last week, Prince is proving himself to still be one of the biggest chart-toppers after sales of his albums and songs sky-rocketed following the news.
The singer, who was found dead at his home in Minnesota April 21, and since then, his music has been topping the sales charts, a normal trend followed by a musician's fans after they die, but something that is even more remarkable for the 57-year-old icon, who had a famous apathy for digital music sales and free streaming content platforms.
Prince's music has limited availability on streaming services and free music platforms like Spotify, YouTube, Daily Motion and SoundCloud, due to his yanking his songs from them relentlessly over the years-and even giving sole access to the tracks to Jay Z's Tidal just last year. He was outspoken about his attempts to keep his music from such services back in 2013, telling Billboard in an interview that he had a sharp legal team which made sure that any attempts to put his music on those sites was quickly shut down.
"I have a team of female black lawyers who keep an eye on such transgressions," he said at the time. "And you know they're sharp."
Because of this, without tuning into his songs that are playing on the radio or on television stations, the only way for fans to get access to his music is through purchasing it, which has led to his music sales topping the charts on iTunes and Amazon, with his Very Best Of album, as well as others, not only hitting the top 10 on the most recent Billboard charts, but easily grabbing the top spots.
According to Billboard, sales were up more than 20,000 percent overall, with The Very Best of Prince selling 100,000 in traditional album sales and grabbing the No. 1 spot (an increase of 11,232 percent), while Purple Rain grabbed the No. 2 spot with 63,000 copies sold, an increase of 3,101 percent.
His album The Hits/The B-Sides, was also in the Top 10, hitting No. 6 with 24,000 in pure album sales, an increase of 10,351 percent.
The fact that his music wasn't available on free streaming services does play into the sales numbers as much as his popularity does, when comparing his sales to those of fellow icon David Bowie, who died of cancer back in January. Bowie's combined sales rose 5,019 percent to 682,000, with pure album sales representing 308,000 of those moved in the week after his death. However, of those, 174,000 were of his new album, Blackstar, which was released just two days before he died.
Similarly, Country music legend Merle Haggard, who died earlier this month, saw an increase of 22,000 album and 87,000 track sales after his death, with increases of 692 and 2,050 percent.
The only other artists who saw such massive gains after their deaths on the same level as Prince were Whitney Houston in 2012, after her Whitney: The Greatest Hits album sold 64,000 copies in just one day (a 10,419 percent increase), and Michael Jackson, who sold 422,000 copies of his albums in the week following his death in 2009, and later surpassed his own sales record while he was alive by selling 13.228 million albums since his death by 2014. Even as late as December of 2015, he was making sales records, with Thriller selling 30 million total copies and topping the charts as the most popular record of all time, and making him the first artist to attain 30-time multiplatinum status.
