Queen’s blockbuster 1981 collection Greatest Hits is the most-streamed album in the U.K. from the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, based on data provided by the Official Charts Company.
The band’s hits-filled album is recognized as the U.K.’s biggest-selling album of all time, shifting more than 6 million units since its release. It’s also logged 973 weeks (and counting) on the Official U.K. Albums Chart.
In 2014, the OCC confirmed that Greatest Hits had become the first album to pass sales in Britain of six million copies, some 900,000 copies ahead, to February that year, of ABBA’s Gold anthology. To add to the honor, the Greatest Hits II album, released exactly a decade later in October 1991, just a month before the untimely death of Freddie Mercury, stood at No.10 in that all-time sales list, with a further 3.9 million UK sales.
That first Greatest Hits, seen by many as the definitive hits collection by any artist, had by November 2021 risen to an astonishing aggregate of 971 weeks in the weekly UK Top 100, 291 of them spent inside the Top 40 and 131 in the Top 20.
Now certified eight times platinum in Queen’s home country, the record also topped the charts on first release in Germany, Holland and Austria among other markets. The album appeared on the UK chart for the first time at No.2, behind British rock’n’roller Shakin’ Stevens’ Shaky, before starting the first of four weeks at the top.
The hits package was in the Top 5 every week until the end of January 1982 and remained in the Top 75 for almost a year, until the end of September. It has reappeared at regular intervals ever since, and as Queen’s legend grew, the album spent an unbroken run of 224 weeks on the Top 100 between 1983 and 1987.
Mercury’s sad death did, of course, give Greatest Hits new momentum, with a nine-week sequence in the Top 10 from late 1991 alongside its second volume. The success of the Bohemian Rhapsody film and its soundtrack propelled the collection back into the UK Top 30 once again, and it spent much of 2020 securely in the Top 20, and sometimes higher. Few, if any, albums in the history of British music have been quite so indispensable.