Adele breaks USA sales record

With over three days left in the sales tracking week, Adele is likely to increase her record number of first week album sales in the USA by a significant amount.

Nielsen Music, the authority on tracking music sales in the United States, has declared Adele’s “25” the single-week top-selling album in the US just days after its release on November 20.

Adele’s “25”, released on Friday (local time), won’t officially enter the Billboard charts until next week, but Billboard said that the album sold more than 900,000 copies on Apple Inc’s iTunes store in its first day.

Like Swift, Adele and her independent record company XL Recordings chose to withhold “25” from streaming platforms such as Apple Inc’s Apple Music service, privately owned Spotify and Google Play.

Canadian heartthrob Justin Bieber didn’t break any sales records with his new redemption-focused album, Purpose, when he released it earlier this month, but it did earn the most streams for a single album in one week by a long shot.

The anticipated follow-up to Eminem’s debut sold 1,760,000 copies in the first week of its 2000 release – and promptly caused controversy for dissing the likes of *N Sync.

Adele isn’t the only one making it rain on the charts – and breaking records in the process.

The 25 album is the first full-length work in four years by Adele (full name Adele Laurie Blue Adkins). The hard-won title was previously held by boy band ‘Nsync’s 2000 album No Strings Attached, which claimed 2,416,000 single-week sales.

The album 25 was originally expected to sell more than 1 million units in North America in its first week, as estimated by Billboard magazine.

25, as usual named by Adele’s age, is less a unified statement than it is a collection of strong, eclectic pop songs disparate enough to please just about everyone.

Before she performed on “Saturday Night Live”, a skit on the show spoke to her wide-ranging popularity.