Adele’s 25 breaks week one sales record

Adele has a powerful voice, but her singing tends toward the theatrical and overblown. Inspired by her real life love, Simon Konecki, the song then moves into how being in that relationship makes one realize that it is, in fact, the right one and how she tries to make it work and last for as long as she can. Any listener is promptly transported to an old European city with flowers blooming and the heat of warm coffee rising in the crisp air as soon as the chorus swoons, “I wish I could live a little more / Look up to the sky, not just the floor”.

Adele’s third studio album is already the biggest selling album of 2015 according to Forbes.

“I like to think I’ve got it in me to do global tour – but we haven’t made any firm plans”.

Yet romantic tumult clearly still has a hold over Adele.

If you have a television or even very occasional access to the internet, you are probably aware that Adele released a new album on November 20. Making up for everything I ever did and never did.

Before the numbing amount of radio plays Adele is about to receive in the next six months, before the genius of a line like “my heart is a valley, it’s so shallow and manmade” has lost its emotional luster, let’s wallow together in the sheer wonderfulness that is this new album.

The release sent shockwaves through the industry late last week.

The race to stream Adele’s 25 on one of the three leading music-streaming platforms is over, and Pandora (NYSE:P) is the victor. While 21 was a heartbreaking ode to a painful breakup, 25 comes after a career-threatening vocal cord surgery and the birth of her son with partner Simon Konecki. “Her sales have slowed down since the weekend but she is still averaging 80,000 copies per day”.

Chris Kirkpatrick retweeted a post about the record being broken, but didn’t add any remarks of his own. While Adele’s team may have urged her to sign up with Apple Music or Spotify, it seems that the success of 25’s hard copies may not need these services going forward. That means other online radio services should be streaming songs from 25 as well. iHeartMedia, for instance, confirmed to The Verge that tracks from 25 are available on iHeartRadio.

After the record-breaking news was announced on Tuesday, members of *NSYNC congratulated Adele on social media. When We Were Young, co-written by Vancouver singer-songwriter Tobias Jesso Jr., is easily the most disarming statement on 25. I felt like I was listening to a Joni Mitchell song in the best possible way.

Yet however much Adele wants in 25 to return to the world of memories, she knows she can not.