She only needed four days.
Barring an inexplicable commercial slowdown, Adele‘s 25 yesterday overtook the all-time week one album sales record in the US.
[UPDATE: It’s official: 25 sold 260,000 copies in the US on Monday (November 23) – cruising to 2.56m in three days.]
We know this because in the LP’s first three days on sale, it shifted an incredible 2.3m in the market, according to local retail monitor BuzzAngle – adding 400,000+ to its 1.9m two-day haul on Sunday (November 23).
That means it would only have needed to sell an additional 116,000 on Monday (November 23) to surpass the first-week tally of NSYNC’s No Strings Attached, which set the record for sales back in March, 2000.
All indications suggest that it had no problem doing so.
Hits reports that Target has already sold half a million CDs in the region, and that close to half of all sales in the region have been physical.
The big question now is how big 25 can get in its first seven days. Sensible predictions suggest it will get close to 3m US sales but not quite break through the milestone.
But as Adele has already proved, sensible predictions seem pretty meaningless right now.
Meanwhile, 25’s performance in the UK is now on course to top 800k, industry experts tell MBW – which would set a new record in that market too.
In the album’s opening three days on sale, it sold just under 540,000, according to the Official Charts Company.
That doesn’t quite top the debut of Oasis’s Be Here Now in 1997, which sold 696,000 in its opening sales week – a sales ‘week’ that was itself only three days long.
The band released the album on Thursday, August 21 that year, which meant it only had until Saturday (August 23) to rack up its ‘debut chart week’ sales before the Top 40 was revealed on the Sunday.
As for 25, it’s now already sold more than double the debut week tally of 25’s record-breaking predecessor, 21, which sold 208,000 in its opening seven days back in 2011.
25 has been issued by Beggars/XL in the UK, with physical distribution handled by [PIAS].
In amongst the whirlwind of 25’s commercial performance, it’s worth noting the astonishing numbers accrued by its opening single, Hello, on streaming sites.
Although Beggars/XL/Sony famously took the decision to keep 25 off Spotify in its opening week, Hello has been available on the service from day one.
The song has recorded 3.88m streams on Spotify in the past week as of this morning (November 24), putting it at No.2 on the worldwide chart behind Justin Bieber’s Sorry.
More importantly, Hello’s lifetime streams on the service now number 162.4m – more than the total plays of hits like Someone Like You (153.4m), Set Fire To The Rain (78.5m) and Make You Feel My Love (92.8m).
The only Adele track Hello’s streaming tally is now behind is Rolling In The Deep, which has attracted 189.1m plays in its lifetime on Spotify.
As for YouTube/Vevo… wow.
The official Hello video has now been played almost 473m on the service since being released on October 23.
That’s an average of 14m plays a day.Music Business Worldwide
