Adele album smashing sales records

Even though Adele’s third album, “25”, is less than a week old, it is already breaking records.

Sales of the album released on Friday continue to grow, selling at least 2.8 million copies in the United States in the first five days, Billboard reported, citing Nielsen Music data.

Adele’s new album, already a best-seller for 2015, won’t play on Spotify or Apple Music – but you can hear it on Pandora, much to the delight of Pandora’s investors. Keeping “25” off of those services, which pay less than outright sales, risked alienating younger fans who don’t tend to buy CDs.

Part of the reason 25 has sold so well is because Adele and her labels declined to offer it on streaming music services for the time being, forcing fans who’d normally listen on a subscription service to purchase the record outright. The new album’s first single, “Hello”, is spending its fourth week on top of Billboard’s Hot 100 chart. With still a few more days to a week on the market, it is more than a clinch for Adele to make a new record-high.

Adele’s 25 is the biggest album in the world right now, and it’s made it there all without a single stream on Spotify.

Bosses had originally planned to keep royalties from any streams during the service’s three-month free trial, but they reversed their policy and agreed to pay during that period after reading Taylor’s letter.

The 25 album is the first full-length work in four years by Adele (full name Adele Laurie Blue Adkins). For the record business as a whole, “25” feels like a welcome, if illusory, return to the glory day of the late nineties, when the industry created the Diamond Award for album sales in excess of ten million. “I’m just doing what I’ve always done”, she said when asked if she’d consider changing her tune. This resulted in “Rebel Heart”, by the boundary-pushing doyenne Madonna, debuting at No. 2 despite selling more copies than that week’s No. 1, the soundtrack to Fox’s “Empire”.