David Bowie is the Best-Selling Vinyl Artist of the 21st Century

The legend that is David Bowie has been revealed as the best-selling vinyl artist of the 21^st century, with The Beatles following a close second.

We’ve all become familiar with the resurgence in vinyl in recent years, and now comes news that David Bowie has topped the list when it comes to sales of the format this century.

Almost six years exactly since the passing of the musical, style, and all-round creative icon, Bowie has established pre-eminence in the vinyl market, Music Week’s chart analyst Alan Jones has reported.

This position was helped by strong sales of Bowie’s Toy album in physical format, which was released in deluxe edition form earlier this year (7^th January) – the day before what would have been the singer’s 75^th birthday. Remarkably, this was Bowie’s 71^st Top 75 album, and his 34^th Top 10 album.

As many fans will know, Toy was in fact a long-lost album that Bowie originally recorded in 2000 following his legendary Glastonbury performance.

Healthy reissues and the resurgence of old classics have also played a key part in cementing Bowie’s position as the king of vinyl. The 1971 classic Hunky Dory, for instance, re-entered at an impressive 31^st spot last week, its highest position since 2017. More interestingly, 2,081 of its 2,550 sales (81%) of these were from vinyl sales, with many clamouring for the newly released 50^th anniversary picture version.

All of these have added to the total of over 582,700 vinyl sales from Bowie’s music in the 2000s, placing him ahead of the only other act to push half a million units this century: The Beatles, with just over 535,600 sales.

With such enduring appeal, it’s perhaps little wonder Warner Chappell Music were recently so keen on forking out close to £200million for the back catalogue of Bowie’s work.

The vinyl resurgence has continued pace, recording its 14^th year of consecutive growth in 2021, as the trade overcame supply issues and manufacturing woes to increase sales by 11% from the previous year, selling approximately 5.3million copies.

This desire for the physical has even extended to a surprising resurgence of the often criticised, yet heavily adored, cassette tape.

All in all, as if we needed any further proof of David Bowie’s legacy, he continues to reign supreme as the best-selling vinyl artist of this century (so far). We’ll just have to patiently see how the rest of the century plays out…

For a far superior delve into the legacy of Bowie, as well as the huge amount of music released since he died, have a read of Karl Hodge’s informal and touching article here.