Adele Says “Hello” to Chart History with 3.48 Million in First-Week Sales
Published at | Updated at
XL Recordings/Columbia(NEW YORK) — Many albums are described as eagerly-anticipated, but it seems no album in recent memory has been as anticipated as Adele‘s 25. The disc has shattered chart records with the highest one-week sales total ever.
Billboard reports that since Nielsen began tracking music sales in 1991, no album has sold more copies in a single week than 25: it racked up sales of 3.48 million units, of which 3.38 million were pure album sales. The rest were made up of track downloads and streams of the single “Hello.” The album itself isn’t available on streaming services.
To give you an idea of just how many copies 25 sold, if you added up the first-week sales of the most recent albums by Taylor Swift, Justin Bieber, Katy Perry, Beyonce, Lady Gaga and One Direction, together, they still wouldn’t total as many albums as 25 managed to shift.
25 is Adele’s second number-one album, following her previous disc, 21. Adele-mania has now pushed that disc, which came out in 2011, back into the top 10. The last time it was there was March of 2013. That means 21 has now spent a total of 82 non-consecutive weeks in the top 10 since its release.
Meanwhile, Adele’s first album, 19, is back in the top 20, thanks to a 252% increase in sales this past week.
Over in her home country, 25 has become the U.K.’s biggest-selling #1 album in history, selling sold 800,307 copies in its first week. The previous record for first-week sales was held by the Oasis album Be Here Now, which sold 696,000 copies in its first week.
Copyright © 2015, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.