It is now official that Adele's "25" album has broken records in the United States for the first-week sales after selling 3.48 million copies. The new record completely obliterates the previous record set by boy band N'Sync's "No Strings Attached" that sold 2.42 million copies in 2000.
According to Billboard, Adele outsold the prior record-holder by more than a million. This is a great accomplishment since no other artists has even broken the two million sales mark this year, including Taylor Swift who managed to sell 1.7 million copies of her latest smash CD, 1989.
According to the same publication, Taylor's CD was released in late October 2014, and sold 3.66 million copies in that year. The implication is that Adele sold as many copies in the first week of release as Swift did in over two months of release in 2014, a time that included the entire lucrative holiday shopping season.
Almost half of the "25" album sales were through digital downloads, with 1.64 million albums bought on the internet. That smashes the previous record holder, Lady Gaga's 2011 "Born This way" by more than one million.
First-week sales figures for Adele's new album were initially announced to be 3.38 million, but an extra 100,000 were later added because of "track equivalent albums" and "streaming equivalent albums," according to Forbes. The artists made headlines when it was announced that, at least for now, her new album would not be found on Spotify, Apple Music or any other streaming services, although she has legal obligation to allow tracks from the album to be played on Pandora.
Since "25" album's first single, "Hello," was released to the big streamers, together with Adele's famous flip phone-featuring video on YouTube, Web streams are included along with digital sales of the single and considered as the album sales, although technically, they should not.
Here is a video clip for Adele's latest album, "25."