Since his death three weeks ago, Prince has been lodged in the upper reaches of the Billboard charts, as hundreds of thousands of Americans have acquired his music—in many cases, for the first time. Prince’s near-total refusal to allow his music on streaming sites of any kind—no Spotify or other on-demand audio sites except Tidal, vigilant takedowns of his material on YouTube during his lifetime—meant that most mourners wishing to experience or re-experience Prince’s material had to buy it.

You could see the results all over Billboard’s two flagship charts, the Billboard 200 album chart and the Hot 100 song chart. At our peak moment of national grief, Prince held down literally half of the Top 10 on the album chart. And in that same week, Prince lodged two singles, “Purple Rain” and “When Doves Cry,” in the Top 10 of the Hot 100—the first time he’d had that many tunes in the winner’s circle since his 1984 peak. A chart performance like that is rare among living artists, let alone the deceased. This week, for example, Drake set a new record for most simultaneous Hot 100 singles with tracks from his new album VIEWS; but counting only songs on which the Toronto rapper takes lead credit, he has one song in the Top 10 (the chart-topper “One Dance”) and a bunch of songs ranked at No. 21 or below. Prince, with his pair of lead-credit Top 10s the week before, had even Drake beat.

That last sentence should make His Royal Badness smile from the great beyond. Prince loved besting the competition—be it Super Bowl halftime performers or fellow Rock Hall inductees or rivals in a pickup basketball game. Even in death, Prince would love to know he slayed the competition. Accordingly, it’s hard to find any pop eminence who held quite this sway over the Billboard charts… well, at least since 2009, when Prince’s lifelong competitor Michael Jackson died under equally shocking, premature circumstances. The postmortem parallels between them on the charts are indeed spooky. In the last seven years, Billboard rules and the music business have changed enough to make apples-to-apples comparisons between the two superstars’ sales feats challenging. But a clear-eyed analysis shows they really were held in similar regard by the public. Arguably, Prince even has Michael to thank for why he's charting this well, with so many albums and singles, at all.

Of course, posthumous sales boosts are not limited to Mr. Nelson or Mr. Jackson. Broadly speaking, any famous musician who dies—particularly when the death is sudden or unexpected—will see a bump on the charts, as sales are boosted by the heartfelt mourner and the morbidly curious alike.

This dates back decades: John Lennon’s December 1980 murder sent his virtually brand-new album with Yoko Ono, Double Fantasy, hurtling to the top of the charts, where it stayed for two months. Kurt Cobain’s April 1994 death lifted In Utero, Nirvana’s roughly six-month-old album, back into the Top 20, and all of the group’s albums to higher positions; for a brief time Bleach was the nation’s top catalog seller. Selena’s murder in March 1995 brought several of her Spanish-language albums onto the U.S. charts for the first time and, four months later, spurred her English-language debut Dreaming of You to debut at No. 1—a bittersweet crossover breakthrough. The shootings of Tupac Shakur in September 1996 and Christopher “Notorious B.I.G.” Wallace in March 1997 spurred their just-recorded studio projects—the former’s Makaveli album and the latter’s Life After Death—to career-best debuts when each was released just weeks after their respective deaths. Johnny Cash’s passing in September 2003 sent his 10-month-old American IV album, containing his aching cover of Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt,” hurtling back into the Top 40, and his 16 Biggest Hits collection became the best-selling catalog title for most of 2003’s remaining months. Just this year, David Bowie scored the first U.S. No. 1 album of his career—yes, ever—when his swan song Blackstar debuted on top the week after his death in January.