Queen‘s quintessential Greatest Hits album has shot to a position within the Top 10 of the Billboard 200 for the first time since its release nearly 40 years ago.
Indeed, as the weekly music sales compendium reported this week (Nov. 22), the Queen Greatest Hits album reached No. 8 on the chart ranking the 200 most popular albums in the United States. The classic rock band’s delayed achievement appears on the Billboard 200 for the week ending Nov. 28.
That’s quite a surge from the Queen compilation’s position at No. 36 the week prior. Yet the sudden sprint for the Top 10 isn’t entirely unexpected considering Greatest Hits‘ longevity on the esteemed U.S. albums ranking. Since its initial release in 1981, the effort has spent a total of 413 weeks on the chart, as Classic Rock pointed out. It previously peaked at No. 11 in 1992.
So what accounted for the week’s uptick in sales as reflected in the Billboard 200?
According to the music industry mag, it was a massive sale on vinyl albums at Walmart that pushed Queen’s Greatest Hits into the Top 10. On Nov. 14, all vinyl in the store was marked down to $15 a pop.
The closeout was enough to notch the classic compilation 36,000 equivalent album units moved in the U.S. for the sales period ending Nov. 19, per statistics that were compiled by Nielsen Music/MRC Data. In that week, Greatest Hits sold 24,000 copies, a whopping 23,000 of which were vinyl LPs.
That’s over a thousand-percent increase in vinyl sales from the previous week. It was such a boost that the Queen disc also became the top-selling Billboard Vinyl Album for the same period (week ending Nov. 28).
Talk about a stellar achievement for a big week for classic rock. On the same week’s Billboard 200, AC/DC‘s new album Power Up attained the No. 1 slot on the strength of 117,000 equivalent U.S. album units.
Not that other Queen compilations haven’t also reached the upper echelon of the Billboard 200. The band’s Greatest Hits I, II & III: The Platinum Collection, a three-disc overview, hit No. 6 on the chart in 2019, a full 17 years after its original U.S. release. The Hollywood Records Classic Queen compilation hit No. 4 in 1992 after its “Bohemian Rhapsody” was featured in the movie Wayne’s World.
The Billboard 200 chart “ranks the most popular albums of the week in the U.S. based on multi-metric consumption as measured in equivalent album units,” the weekly digest maintains. “Units comprise album sales, track equivalent albums (TEA) and streaming equivalent albums (SEA).”
See Queen in 26 Rock + Metal T-Shirts Everyone’s Owned at Some Point