Freddie Mercury ( b16 )

Legacy

Continued popularity

The extent to which Mercury's death may have enhanced Queen's popularity is not clear. In the US, where Queen's popularity had lagged in the 1980s, sales of Queen albums went up dramatically in 1992, the year following his death. In 1992, one American critic noted, "What cynics call the 'dead star' factor had come into play—Queen is in the middle of a major resurgence." The movie Wayne's World, which featured "Bohemian Rhapsody", also came out in 1992. According to the Recording Industry Association of America, Queen had sold 34.5 million albums in the US by 2004, about half of which had been sold since Mercury's death in 1991.

Estimates of Queen's total worldwide record sales to date have been set as high as 300 million. In the UK, Queen has now spent more collective weeks on the UK Album Chartsthan any other musical act (including The Beatles), and Queen's Greatest Hits is the best-selling album of all time in the UK. Two of Mercury's songs, "We Are the Champions" and "Bohemian Rhapsody", have also each been voted as the greatest song of all time in major polls by Sony Ericsson and Guinness World Records, respectively. Both songs have been inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame; "Bohemian Rhapsody" in 2004 and "We Are the Champions" in 2009. In October 2007 the video for "Bohemian Rhapsody" was voted the greatest of all time by readers of Q magazine.

Posthumous Queen album

In November 1995, Queen released Made in Heaven, an album featuring Mercury's previously unreleased final recordings from 1991—as well as outtakes from previous years and reworked versions of solo works by the surviving members. The album cover features the Freddie Mercury statue that overlooks Lake Geneva superimposed with Mercury's Duck House lake cabin that he had rented. This is where he had written and recorded his last songs at Mountain Studios. The sleeve of the album contains the words, "Dedicated to the immortal spirit of Freddie Mercury."

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