Adele ’s third studio album was released on November 20th through XL/Columbia Records. It appears that the album will break the 15 year old record set by NSYNC. To those who do not know what NSYNC was, it was the famous boy band from the 90s which had Justin Timberlake as one of its members and nobody remembers the rest of the members.
NSYNC’s album has a long-standing one-week Nielsen-era U.S. album sales record of 2.42 million sold albums. It was predicted that Adele’s new album 25 will go on to sell at least 2.5 million album copies in the very first week. The album sold more than 900,000 copies alone through the iTunes Store on its first day of release.
Can Adele break NSYNC’s record?
NSYNC currently owns the single largest sales week for an album since Nielsen Music began tracking point-of-sale music purchases in 1991. Before 1991, there was no official and authorized music sales tracking service in the United States of America. It was mostly unknown and unpredictable that how many albums or copies of a released single were sold in the very first week. NSYNC’s No Strings Attached debuted with a whopping number of 2,416,000 copies that sold in the week ending March 26, 2000. Since then, No Strings Attached has remained the only album to sell 2 million copies in the US in a single week. As Nielsen Music’s tracking week runs Friday through Thursday each week, 25’s first week will conclude on November 26. Once Nielsen is finished processing the weekly sales data achieved by Adele, Billboard will report the debut sales figures on November 29.
Some major predictions were made before the album 25 was released. It was reported that the album has shipped 3.6 million physical copies to retailers. The CD Configuration is expected to sell 1.5 million in its first week. And major breakthrough is expected as the digital edition could mov another 1 million. Thus, it is highly expected that the first week sales might hit 2.5 million in total.
The Rift with the Streaming Services
Adele’s new album will not be available on Spotify and Apple music. The decision will majorly affect the reach of the album and its expected sales. Adele took the decision herself and joined the league of other music stars such as Beyoncé and Taylor Swift. The streaming services do not seem happy about Adele’s decision. For Adele, the issue might not be that big, but the issue will affect both the streaming services and Adele. This is second year in a row that they do not have the album of the year on the list. Though Spotify expects to resolve the issue and said that they hope Adele will take back her decision and let her fans enjoy the new album. Though, the first released single of the album, “Hello” was widely available on the streaming services. It broke records with 1.1 million downloads in the very first week. Adele came up with a song after a long break and the emotionally moving video and lyrics made the song an instant hit.
Though we will have to wait till November 29 to see if Adele breaks all the previous benchmarks and sets the new one or not, fans are highly optimistic.
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