Adele's "25" album just broke the 15-year record of NSYNC of 2.4 million sales of its "No Strings Attached" album established in 2000 for first-week sales of an album.
According to Billboard, Adele's third album sold 3.38 million copies in the U.S. alone on its first week of sales. After NSYNC's feat, no other artist reach 2 million sales since 2000, making music industry executives wonder before she released "25" last week if the 27-year-old Brit singer could break the boy band's record, Fortune reports.
The sales makes Adele a phenomenon because album sales have been going down the past few years. The industry executives believe that Adele's 3 million plus mark may possibly never be broken.
Adele also broke records in the UK with a total first-week sales of more than 800,000 copies of "25" sold, higher by 100,000 the previous record.
Because Adele's album is purely in CD only since the 11 songs are not available on streaming platforms, she just proved that people still buy albums for worthy projects such as "25." In contrast, Justin Bieber's "Sorry" which also broke Official Chart records, was 5.35 million streams, while the album "Purpose," where "Sorry" is included, got 205 million streams on Spotify.
Billboard says that "25" also smashed Taylor Swift's 2015 album "1989" record sales of 1.8 million. It is only one of 20 albums that have reached the million mark in physical sales.
Adele's last album, "21, released in 2011, sold a total of 11.2 million copies in the U.S., making it the 10th largest-selling album in the history of Nielsen.