George Michael's untimely death causes a 2,678% sales resurgence in the US
George Michael's passing on Christmas Day saddened his legion of fans across the world, and details of the impact of his death on the US charts has been revealed.
The first full sales week since George's death has now been recorded, and the legendary singer-songwriter's music was boosted by a whopping 2,678% on the other side of the Atlantic. Three of George's singles back catalogue hit the Billboard Hot 100 and two of his albums re-enter the US albums chart's Top 20.
Careless Whisper is his highest charting single on the Hot 100, landing at Number 33. The song originally peaked at Number 1 for three weeks back in February 1985. Another of George's solo tracks Faith also charts at 47.
Sandwiched in between those two songs is Last Christmas, which hits a new peak of 41. The track was never commercially released in the US back in 1984 and 2016 marked its first year that it ascended up the chart.
On the Billboard 200 album chart, 103,000 album equivalent sales were logged and the collection that sees the highest uplift is Twenty Five, Michael's 2006 greatest hits retrospective. The album reaches a new peak of 12 after originally charting at Number 28. George's debut solo album Faith lands at 18.
Here in the UK, six of George's albums impacted the Official Albums Chart Top 100 last week, while Last Christmas was boosted to Number 7, marking the first time it has entered the Official Singles Chart Top 10 for 31 years.
America's Billboard singles and albums Top 20s are posted here on OfficialCharts.com every Wednesday.
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Gavin Ryan
Too see how much of George's returned to the Australian charts this week, check out my chartifacts here:
http://www.noise11.com/news/australian-charts-clean-bandit-has-final-no-1-song-of-2016-20170102
http://www.noise11.com/news/australian-charts-michael-buble-ends-2016-with-no-1-christmas-album-20170102
Sunshine Gal
hey mates, here's a quick update on our mate george on the current bb charts for this week:
hot 100: #33-careless whisper *top 40 is heavy radio airplay* & #47-faith.
200 albums chart: #12-twenty-five; #18-faith; #84-best of (greatest hits)
catalog albums chart: #4-faith; #5-twenty-five; #17-best of (greatest hits); #36-make it big.
the thing with the catalog albums chart: they focus mostly on sales and concentrate on older albums. right now, there's quite a bit of past xmas albums flooding the chart, but once the xmas albums start falling out of the chart, i'm very confident george will continue to make splashes with his other albums and esp. the faith album & continue flooding the top 10 :) .
and this past week, about 477k george/wham albums and singles were sold here in the u.s. ;) and still sold out in many u.s. outlets, both online and physical stores.