The year’s biggest-selling single to date, Pharrell Williams’ Happy, has now also been certified 3x Platinum by the BPI – the music industry body which administers the iconic Platinum, Gold & Silver Certified Awards Scheme.
Happy first went on sale as the lead single from the smash movie soundtrack to Despicable Me 2, and has now sold just over 1.8m copies since its release in June 2013. The song went to No.1 in the Official Charts in the final week of 2013, and has gone on to spend a further three weeks in the top spot on separate occasions this year, and has not been out of the top 20 in 2014.
The vast majority of its sales – 86.1 per cent – have come in the shape of digital downloads (over 1.5m), while the song has also been streamed over 25m times, which works out as the equivalent of a quarter of a million ‘sales’ when measured by the Official Charts’
100 – 1 conversation rate for streaming – or 13.8% of the total (source: Official Charts Company).
Often also associated with his trademark Buffalo hat, Pharrell Williams is one of the hottest music stars on the planet right now, having also co-written and performed on last year’s global smashes Blurred Lines and Get Lucky.
The last single to be awarded 3x Platinum status was Aqua’s Barbie Girl in July 2013. Only two other singles have gone 3x Platinum in the post-1994 Official Charts Company era: Will Young’s Anything Is Possible/Evergreen in 2002 and Elton John’s Candle In The Wind 1997/Something About The Way You Look Tonight in 1997, which remains the best-selling single of all time and is certified 9x Platinum.
