David Bowie is Top-Selling Vinyl Artist of the 21st Century
David Bowie has been named the best-selling vinyl artist of the twenty-first century. The late musician’s 582,704 vinyl sales in the 2000s (as of January 6) put him ahead of the only other act to sell more than half a million records on the format — The Beatles (535,596 sales).
According to Alan Jones who is the chart analyst for Music Week, the same two artists lead the way in the 2020s, with Bowie having 134,237 sales and The Beatles having 113,613. Bowie came in third (53,181) among the Top 10,000 vinyl sellers in 2021, behind The Beatles (58,567) and Taylor Swift (56,917).
Due to a successful reissues campaign, Bowie has been ahead on vinyl for the first two years of the decade. Bowie’s “lost” 2000 album “Toy” has recently landed in the UK Top 5 thanks to strong physical sales (based on Official Charts Company data). According to Music Weeks, the sales revenue will be significant, as Rhino Entertainment sold nearly 1,000 (989) copies of the six 10″ vinyl box, which retails for nearly £120 on the official website.
‘Toy’ sold 7,400 copies in its first week, including vinyl, 5,851 £26 CD box sets (now sold out on the official store), 240 downloads, and 304 sales-equivalent streams. The week’s overall greatest selling on tangible media was ‘Toy,’ which was released on January 7, a day before Bowie’s 75th birthday.
Another Bowie vinyl, one of three Top 40 entries, had the most vinyl sales in the previous week. ‘Hunky Dory,’ which was re-released at the end of 2021 to commemorate its 50th anniversary, re-entered at Number 31 — its best position since 2017. (2,081 of its 2,550 sales in the week were vinyl).
The third album in the latest chart is David Bowie’s 2016 compilation ‘Legacy,’ which rose 38-19 (3,231 sales) to reach its best chart position for exactly a year during the Bowie75 campaign.
The announcement comes as the vinyl format celebrates nearly 15 years of continuous development. Despite widely publicised concerns with backlogs and delays, the BPI recently revealed that UK vinyl sales in 2021 were at their best in 30 years.
For the first time in decades, vinyl has surpassed CD in unit sales in the United States. According to figures from the MRC and Billboard, vinyl accounted for 38.3 percent of all album sales in the country last year, while it accounted for more than half of all physical album sales (41.72 million sales out of a total of 82.79 million).
