Skip to footer

How Adele surpassed previous sales record holder with new album '25'

Adele's '25' not only broke the record for most albums sold in a week but left it far behind. The singer's album sales numbers are far beyond what any other music act is achieving.

|
John Shearer/Invision/AP
Adele arrives at the 2013 Oscars in Los Angeles.

We knew Adele had broken a sales record for her newest album, "25," but her sales also far outpaced those of the band that previously sold the most records in a week.

Adele's album "25" sold 3.38 million copies in its first week, far surpassing NSYNC's 2000 album "No Strings Attached," which held the record for most album sales in a week after selling 2.416 million albums at that time.

Thus Adele holds the record for most albums sold in a week since Nielsen started examining these numbers in 1991.

Adele's work was released on Nov. 20 and so is of course expected to do well during the holiday shopping season as well as during 2016. Adele's previous album "21," for example, became the bestselling album of both 2011 and 2012 after being released in 2011.

How did Adele do this? Her album sales were most likely helped by the decision by her and her team to keep "25" off services like Spotify and Apple Music. If "25" wasn't available on streaming, fans who wanted to hear it badly enough most likely decided to purchase a copy, helping the album's sales. ("25" is available on the radio program Pandora – music by artists like Adele becomes available there automatically.)

In addition, there was demand for her music. "21" became a huge smash and there was a four-year gap in between Adele's albums. By comparison, artists that had some of the bestselling albums of the year in recent years like Taylor Swift and One Direction have released two and four albums since 2011, respectively.

In 2012, Adele's "21" sold more copies in England than Michael Jackson's "Thriller." "25" could do the same, especially as "25" has a bigger head start – "21" sold only 352,000 copies in its first week (that's an "only" by Adele standards).

These are numbers that are increasingly rare in the music industry, where album sales are affected by illegal downloads and streaming services. By comparison, Swift's "1989," the top-selling album of 2014, sold 3.66 million copies that year.

Adele's success may be due to a combination of factors: her vocal prowess shows her genuine talent, her songs have a retro mood that gives them a wide appeal, and her album not appearing on streaming services means consumers have fewer places where they can find it.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to How Adele surpassed previous sales record holder with new album '25'
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Culture-Cafe/2015/1130/How-Adele-surpassed-previous-sales-record-holder-with-new-album-25
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe