David Bowie’s ‘Blackstar’ Album Debuts At No. 1 On Billboard 200 Chart

Music legend David Bowie landed his first No. 1 album, just days after he succumbed to cancer at the age of 69. The album, “Blackstar,” made its debut atop the Billboard 200 chart, according to Billboard.

During the week ended Jan. 14, Bowie’s “Blackstar” sold the equivalent of 181,000 album units. About 174,000 were album sales, according to Nielsen Music data. This figure more than doubled his previous first-week-sales record, which was held by “The Next Day”: About 85,000 units of that album were sold during its first week of release in 2013.

Billboard in 2014 revised its album chart to encompass not only the sales of albums but also the sales of digital tracks and online streams. Bowie’s newest album wasn’t the only one of his productions to make the tracker’s charts. According to Billboard, nine of his albums made their ways onto the Billboard 200 chart. They included “Best of Bowie” at No. 4 and “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars” at No. 21.

While it’s common for fans to mourn the deaths of their favorite musicians by relistening to their work, streaming services such as Apple Music, Spotify and others have made it increasingly easy to catch up with now-deceased artists without the need of digging a physical album out of the attic.

Bowie is one of the few artists to have two albums among the top four on the Billboard album chart simultaneously. The last artist to accomplish that was Adele in March 2012, when she had her “21” at No. 1 and her “19” at No. 4.

Bowie had been battling liver cancer for 18 months before his death in New York Jan. 10.