You tried to leave us behind, Freddie Mercury, but we won’t let you go

Bohemian Rhapsody puts Queen on top of the streaming charts.

Freddie Mercury performs at a concert in Paris in 1984. Picture: AFP.

Music streaming services have found somebody to love from the 20th century. Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody is the most streamed song from the pre-streaming era and the most streamed classic rock song of all time, according to Universal Music Group.

Released in 1975, the song made for an unlikely smash hit. At six minutes long, it is twice as long as a typical pop song and shifts musical gears repeatedly, from sensitive ballad to operatic drama to hard-rock anthem. It has found a new audience on streaming services thanks to the success of the Freddie Mercury biopic of the same name, released last month.

Bohemian Rhapsody, a single from the British rock band’s seminal album A Night at the Opera, has been streamed more than 1.6 billion times globally on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube and other streaming services, according to Universal, the world’s biggest music company.

In taking the top spot, the song pulled ahead of Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit, Guns N’ Roses’ Sweet Child O’ Mine and its Nov­ember Rain, as well as A-ha’s Take On Me.

Rock as a genre has been losing popularity in the age of streaming and last year was dethroned by R&B/hip-hop as the biggest music genre in the US.

Yet weekly streams of Queen’s catalogue music more than tripled in the US from the week the movie soundtrack was released in October to more than 100 million a week after the film came out, according to Nielsen Music data. The film’s soundtrack peaked at No 3 on the Billboard 200 albums chart for the week ending November 15, with Bohemian Rhapsody the No 5 bestselling song during the period.

“So the river of rock music has metamorphosed into streams,” says Queen guitarist Brian May. “Very happy that our music is still flowing to the max.”

The film Bohemian Rhapsody became the highest grossing music biopic in history five weeks after its release. Through last weekend, the film has grossed more than $US596 million ($827m) at the global box office, according to Twentieth Century Fox, which released it. The soundtrack, full of original recordings by the band, was released by Disney’s Hollywood Records and Universal’s Virgin EMI.

Bohemian Rhapsody, the song, landed at No 1 for nine consecutive weeks in Britain in 1975 and was Queen’s first top 10 hit in the US. The song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2004.

The accompanying video is widely regarded as the first music video, after which it became regular practice for record companies to produce such videos to promote singles. In 1976, Bohemian Rhapsody was the second highest selling single on the Australian charts, behind ABBA’s Fernando.