Prince's classics race to the top of Kiwi iTunes charts

Prince's biggest hits have raced to the top Kiwi iTunes download charts this morning, following the sudden death of the 57-year-old pop icon.

Purple Rain is sitting at number one on the iTunes songs chart in New Zealand, with Raspberry Beret at number four and When Doves Cry at number seven.

In the albums chart, The Very Best of Prince is now number one and Ultimate: Prince is number two.

The Purple Rain (Soundtrack from the Motion Picture) album is at number four, Sign O' the Times is at number six, andThe Hits/The B-Sides Prince album is at number nine.

Prince has had three number one singles in New Zealand - Alphabet St. in 1988, Batdance in 1989 and The Most Beautiful Girl in the World in 1994.

Meanwhile, Kiwi fans have also been flocking to music stores in search of hard copy Prince records.

Chris Hart, owner of Real Groovy in central Auckland, said there were three people waiting at the door this morning when they opened.

"And they pretty well cleaned out the Prince vinyl section of all the second hand ones. One guy had probably...it looked like eight or 10 albums under his arm."

Mr Hart said there had been a steady flow of Prince sales since.

"There's been a lot of people asking. We've still got a lot of new ones because we stocked up obviously a while back when he toured and the sales were still pretty strong. So I've been re-stocking them to a higher level than we have the last 10 years."

He said this always happens when an artist dies.

"There are some people who come in to try and make a bit of money out of it, and others who realise that now's the time to get those things that they've been meaning to buy because they're probably not going to be around for very much longer. But we don't put the prices up or anything like that."