Adele Breaks Records With New Album ’25’

British singer Adele’s new album sold a record 3.38 million USA copies in its first full week, Nielsen Music said, becoming the biggest-selling album of 2015 in an astonishing feat for an era when artists rarely top 1 million.

After just one week on sale it’s already sold nearly twice as many copies as Taylor Swift’s 1989 album has in the whole of 2015. Their third album, Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water, sold more than a million copies in October 2000. One thing the albums have in common is that the artists chose not to stream them on Spotify, favouring potential sales over free streams and likely contributing to their monster numbers.

Adele got a lot of bang for her buck with her new 25 album. Early Billboard projections had her comeback album, 25, going double-platinum in its first week. Guy Sebastian’s debut went 4x platinum its first week and Shannon Noll’s went 3 x platinum a few months later.

The figures for “25” were the biggest single-week sales tally for an album since Nielsen began tracking sales in 1991.

Usher’s 2004 album Confessions sold more than a million copies in its debut week. Sales of 25 comprised a whopping 41 percent of all US album sales that week, and 51 percent of those sales were physical copies of the album. We’ll see if the new album can top that as well. The Weeknd’s chart mainstay Beauty Behind the Madness jumps up three spots to No. 5, Pentatonix bring the Christmas flavor with That’s Christmas to Me and a return to the top 10 at No. 6. 25 still managed to hit a respectable Number 2 position in PNG.

Inner circle … Adele leaves a NY restaurant with her bodyguard after dining with Jennifer Lawrence and Emma Stone. As Adele and her label, XL Recordings, continue to work 25, the sales will hardly subside.

If we’ve done our sums right, it means that since midnight on Friday, Adele has shifted over 200,000 copies of 25.

Being named one of the most influential people in the world by Time magazine.