As we reported last month, the amount of copies that Adele’s new album, the eagerly anticipated 25, managed to sell in its first week was nothing short of remarkable, with the album breaking records and setting new benchmarks.
The 27-year-old singer’s latest full-length effort sold more copies in the US in its first week than any other album in history, a record previously held by NSYNC, which Adele smashed in just three days in a volatile music market.
In an age when musicians are struggling to sell albums, 25 managed to sell more than 2.4 million copies in just over three days. In Australia, it took 25 just three days to hit triple platinum, shifting 210,000 units in less than a week.
But the crazy stats surrounding Adele’s third album don’t end there. To get an idea of just what an anomaly 25 is in today’s music market, Musixmatch is reporting that more people searched for Adele’s lyrics on Google than for torrents of the record.
As Noise11 reports, for the first time this year, the Number 1 single and album in the country both belong to the same artist, with Adele’s ‘Hello’ topping the singles chart for a fifth straight week and 25 sitting atop the albums chart.
According to ARIA, 25 is the first album to debut with a platinum certification since Susan Boyle’s I Dreamed a Dream in 2009. However, 25 did not take out the record for the biggest debut sales week in Australia.
The two biggest first sales weeks in ARIA Albums history belong to our first two Australian Idol finalists. Guy Sebastian’s debut went 4x platinum its first week and Shannon Noll’s went 3 x platinum a few months later.
Over in the UK, 25 had the biggest opening week in the nation’s history. Selling 800,307 copies, Adele smashed the record previously held by Oasis and their third album, Be Here Now, which came out in 1997 to move 696,000 units.
Britons bought twice as many physical copies of the album as digital, with 25 shifting 548,000 physical units and 252,423 digital copies last week. In fact, it sold more copies than the next 86 albums on the UK albums chart combined.
Stateside, total first-week US sales came in at 3,327,992 units, with physical sales again outdoing digital. Adele managed to sell 1,682,840 physical copies of 25 in the US and 1,645,152 digital copies.
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To put that in context, either of the above totals alone would have made 25 the fourth-best selling first-week album of the last 15 years. 25 represented more than 67 percent of all sales on the Billboard Top 200.
Taking a look at the rest of the globe, 25 reached the top of the iTunes charts in almost every one of a possible 119 countries, with only Niger, Anguilla, and Papua New Guinea holding out. 25 still managed to hit a respectable Number 2 position in PNG.
Naturally, Adele’s stellar sales will yield a healthy payday for the artist and her record label. Helping things along is the fact that 25 is not available on any streaming service like Spotify or Apple Music.
Assuming Adele makes $2 for every copy of 25 sold, that’s a profit of $6,655,984 in the US alone. With the average Spotify per-stream payout coming in at about $0.0072, 25 would need 924,442,222 streams to see that kind of return.
Of course, we wouldn’t put such a feat past the singer. At the time of writing, Adele’s video for ‘Hello’, the lead single taken from the new album, is sitting at just over half a billion views, a number it racked up in just a few weeks.
