It’s fair to say this is going better than anyone dared expect.
Adele‘s 25 sold a scarcely believable 1.9m copies in its first two days on sale in the US, according to early data from reliable local retail monitor BuzzAngle – and therefore obviously shifted more than 2m copies across the world in the same timeframe.
Sixty-two percent of these US sales (around 1.18m) were digital downloads, says BuzzAngle – after Adele and her Stateside label Columbia (Sony) notoriously decided not to put the album on streaming services such as Spotify.
Of the 38% of US sales (722,000) on physical formats, 98% were on CD, with 2% on vinyl.
25 shifted 900,000 copies on US iTunes alone in its first day on sale, according to Billboard.
What all of this means: it is now starting to look like a foregone conclusion that 25 will shatter the official all-time first week record for album sales in America.
That record – restricted to the Nielsen SoundScan era, which began in 1991 – is currently held by NSYNC, whose No Strings Attached sold 2,416,000 units during its opening week in March, 2000.
As for Adele’s 25, the extraordinary numbers don’t stop there.
It is currently No.1 on 106 of the 119 iTunes charts around the world, MBW understands.
The Adele At The BBC TV special, which aired on the UK’s BBC One on Friday night, officially drew in 4.54m viewers according to stats released today – an impressive 19.8% share of the audience.
As for 25’s UK sales, MBW revealed yesterday that it had shifted more than 300,000 in its opening 24 hours.
Although we don’t yet have confirmation of what happened on Saturday (November 21), the senior-level music biz execs we’ve spoken to are telling us that a 700k+ UK week one is on the cards.
Something like a phenomenon.Music Business Worldwide
