About this episode

This episode discusses Prince's unprecedented achievement of placing twenty singles on the Billboard Hot 100 chart simultaneously after his death.

# The Day Prince Crashed the Billboard Charts (Literally All of Them) **June 4, 2016** On this date, something utterly unprecedented happened in music chart history. Prince Rogers Nelson—the Purple One, His Royal Badness, the Artist Formerly (and Currently Again) Known as Prince—posthumously *obliterated* the Billboard Hot 100 chart in a way that had never been seen before and will likely never be witnessed again. Just six weeks after his shocking death on April 21, 2016, Prince achieved what can only be described as a supernatural chart invasion. On June 4, Billboard announced that Prince had placed an absolutely mind-boggling **TWENTY singles** simultaneously on the Hot 100 chart. To put this in perspective, this was more than any artist had ever achieved at one time, living or dead. But wait—it gets more purple-reignish: Five of those tracks debuted in the Top 10 *at the same time*. We're talking "Purple Rain" (#4), "When Doves Cry" (#8), "Little Red Corvette" (#9), "Let's Go Crazy" (#9 tie), and "1999" (#10). The Beatles, during their initial invasion of American charts, had never done this. Michael Jackson at his peak hadn't done this. Nobody had. The chart domination…

Topics covered

• Billboard charts
• Prince
• music history
• posthumous releases
• chart records

Keywords

• Prince
• Billboard
• Hot 100
• music charts
• posthumous

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: The Very Best Of Prince, Purple Rain, Little Red Corvette, Let's Go Crazy, 1999

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