Adele’s New Album ’25’ Projected To Smash Music Industry Records

Bad news for those of us who love Adele but also love living in a modern world: 25 will not be available on streaming services like Apple Music and Spotify.

According to a new report, streaming music subscribers won’t be “rolling in the deep” with Adele’s new music tomorrow. They have snapped up 14 million copies of her albums in the US, according to Nielsen, and 33 million of her digital singles. In doing so, Adele’s team is gambling that she is immune to the sales woes that have strangled the rest of the music industry.

Adele’s new album 25 is everything a guaranteed-million-plus-selling, recording-executive-career-saving record should be. But for fans who like to stream their music, this news could be nearly as emotionally devastating as listening to “25” in the first place. Billboard reports that Columbia has shipped 3.6 million physical copies of the album to be in stores on Friday.

Meet music’s most coveted coterie: the fans of Adele.

Adele’s 25 is just hours away, but there may be a “buy” button standing in your way before you get to listen.

Most of the top-selling artists in the first half of 2015 struck a chord with a similar demographic.

If sales predictions are correct, 25 is on course for the biggest first week figures since 2000, when N’SYNC’s No Strings Attached shifted 2.4 million units on debut, which was at the height of the CD era and before the download revolution that has made such sales figures much more hard.

When it came to her first album, “21”, Adele said she would “drown” herself in the sadness of it all.

Goldman, however, says that while the tactic may generate an early sales bump for Adele, it won’t impede the rise of streaming, which is virtually the only growth area for the recorded music industry.

“I miss it when life was a party to be thrown”, she sings, her youth already wasted (at 27!), “but that was a million years ago”.

Adele’s prior records, “19” and “21”, are available on a few streaming services, and the decision involving “25” won’t affect that.