Adele’s 25 is now a certified blockbuster. In its first three days of release, the singer’s third album has already sold 2.3m copies in the US, according to Nielsen Music. Industry forecasters are now betting the album could sell 2.9m copies in the country by the end of the week.
Since Neilsen Music began tracking sales in 1991, only N Sync’s 2000 album, No Strings Attached, sold over 2m copies in a single week. By the end of Monday, Billboard reports 25 should eclipse that record’s single-week sales record of 2.4m.
In an enjoyable coincidence, the lead single from 25 is Hello; the first track to be released from No Strings Attached was Bye, Bye, Bye.
In the UK, 25 is also on track to become the fastest-selling album ever. Over three days, 25 has sold over 538,000 copies in the UK. Only two albums have ever sold more than 500,000 copies in a week in the UK: Take That’s Progress sold 519,000 in its debut week in November 2010, and Oasis’s Be Here Now, the all-time record holder, notched up 696,000 in its first chart week in August 1997. Adele stands to surpass that milestone with four days of the chart week still left to run.
Album sales may have been boosted by Adele’s decision to not make 25 available to listen on streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music. She has already dethroned Beyoncé to have the fastest-selling album in iTunes history. 25 sold in excess of 900,000 copies via Apple’s music service within the first day of its release on Friday. The figure tops the 617,000 copies purchased within the first three days of sales for Beyoncé’s unannounced, self-titled visual album in 2013.
Hello, the lead single off of 25, debuted at No 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. Over the course of a week, the song was downloaded 1.1m times, almost doubling the previous record set by Flo Rida, who sold 600,000 downloads of Right Round in a week in February 2009. Meanwhile, the video for Hello – directed by French-Canadian film-maker Xavier Dolan – has been viewed more than 400m times andbeen parodied by people ranging from Sir David Attenborough to the Muppets.
