Adele’s 25 Tops the Billboard Top 200 in Opening Week

That was the year No Strings Attached sold 2.4 million copies in the first week of its release- an impressive number, but one 25 bested by almost one million copies. The Billboard 200 chart ranks the most popular albums of the week based on multi-metric consumption, which includes traditional album sales, track equivalent albums (TEA) and streaming equivalent albums (SEA).

The record for highest first week sales was previously held by Hikaru Utada’s 2001 album Distance that made over three million album sales in Japan.

The British star’s release set a record for the largest single sales week for an album since Nielsen began methodically tracking weekly music sales in 1991, the company said late Saturday. The previous record was set by Oasis’ Be Here Now, which sold 696,000 copies in the week it was released back in 1997. A band like Maroon 5 might generate a ton of radio play, ticket sales, and even singles sold, but it does not move albums.

Most artists won’t pull their new music from streaming services to sell more albums simply because that won’t be the end result.

As expected, Adele’s “25” says hello to the No. 1 spot of Billboard 200 with phenomenal first-week sales. The current album follows the Grammy winning chart-topper 21.

Meanwhile, the New York Times continues to be criticised to get a “sexist” and “dissing” tweet used to encourage a post about Adele. It took 15 years for *NSYNC’s record to be broken… we can’t see the record being snatched from Adele any time soon.

Stateside, total first-week U.S. sales came in at 3,327,992 units, with physical sales again outdoing digital. “21” was also the longest running no. 1 song for a woman in the chart’s history.

The album was one of its kind to have spent the most weeks on the top of the list.