Adele’s 25 set to be one of best-selling albums in one week

The special edition of Take That’s III – which includes new single Hey Boy – enters at 6, Olly Murs re-enters the tally at 10 with the repack of his latest album Never Been Better, and Adele’s 21 jumps 17 spots to Number 12.

The current one-week record is held by 1990s-era boy band ‘N Sync, which sold 2.42 million copies of No Strings Attached in 2000.

Billboard also states that “25” might even break the previous record of NSYNC selling 2.4 million in a week. Last week, three critically acclaimed album releases by Grimes, Jamie Woon and Floating Points sold a combined total of just 7,000 albums.

“25” was released on Friday, November 20th, and is Adele’s third album.

We know that Adele is bigger than every other pop star, but now it seems that the big-bellied wonder sells a s**tload of music as well.

On iTunes alone, “25” sold at least 900,000 downloads, according to Billboard, and the album is No. 1 on Apple’s iTunes chart in 110 countries.

Apple said it was “thrilled” to offer Adele’s “25” for purchase on iTunes.

Reports are even saying that “25” could even sell up to 3 million if the surge of demand for the British singer/songwriter’s new album maintains its intensity.

One thing’s for sure: execs from XL and Columbia, the record labels which co-released 25, are going to be celebrating this week.

The heartbreak ballad went platinum a week after its October release and has sold more than 2.5 million digital copies. For one, our growing user population might listen to more music in a given month than the month before (resulting in a lower effective “per stream”), while generating far more aggregate royalties for artists …

That would be the highest weekly sales for any album since at least 1991, when SoundScan – a tracking service now owned by Nielsen – began collecting reliable data from retailers.

“There isn’t anybody that I’ve talked to in the music business who hasn’t been astonished by these numbers”, said Dave Bakula, senior vice president for industry insights at Nielsen.