Aretha Franklin Streams, Sales Soar in the Days After Her Death

By Variety Staff

LOS ANGELES (Variety.com) – Not surprisingly, sales and streams for Aretha Franklin’s dozens of albums and hundreds of songs soared in the days after her death on Aug. 16 .

According to BuzzAngle Music, her song streams rocketed some 1,452% on the day of her death to just over 26 million total, while her album sales climbed 1,362% on the day of her death to just over 21,000 — a solid figure in the age of streaming. From Thursday through the end of the surveyed period on Sunday, she was the top-selling artist with more than 45,000 total album sales, and the fourth most-streamed artist with 57 million song streams.

The top-streamed song, not surprisingly, was the Queen of Soul’s legendary anthem, the Otis Redding-penned 1968 hit “Respect,” with 4,987,752 streams, with “I Say a Little Prayer,” from the same year, not far behind with 4,076,003. (Interestingly, both songs were originally hits for other artists — Redding and Dionne Warwick, respectively — yet Franklin indisputably made them her own.)

The top-selling album was the near-definitive 1985 collection of hits from her long stint with Atlantic Records, “30 Greatest Hits,” with 22,251 units sold in those four days.