Adele on Track to Break ‘Unbreakable’ Sales Record

Adele’s 25 appears set to break a record that had long been considered unbreakable: the one-week sales record for an album, which *NSYNC established in March 2000 when their sophomore album, No Strings Attached, sold 2,416,000 copies in the U.S. in its first week.

How high can 25 go in its first week? The album shipped 3.6 million physical copies to retailers. There is, of course, no limit on the number of digital copies it can sell. 25 sold more than 900K copies through the iTunes store on its first day of release. Music insiders suggest that 25 will sell at least 2.5 million copies in in its first week. The tally, which will be officially reported on Nov. 29, could even top 3 million.

(photo: AP)

It’s far harder to run up these lofty sales totals now than it was in 2000, when album sales were at their dizzy peak. Five albums rang up first-week sales in excess of 1 million in 2000, and nine albums had first-week sales of 500K or more. By contrast, 25 will become just the second album to post first-week sales of 500K or more this year (following Justin Bieber’s Purpose, which sold 522K copies last week).

25 will instantly become the best-selling album of 2015, pulling ahead of Taylor Swift’s 1989, which has sold 1,742,000 copies so far this year (on top of the 3,661,000 that it sold in the last nine weeks of 2014). This will be the third time that Adele has had the best-selling album of the year. Her sophomore album, 21, was the top seller of both 2011 and 2012.

Adele will become the first artist to have the top-selling album of the year three times since Nielsen Music (formerly known as Nielsen SoundScan) began tracking music sales in 1991. Swift, Eminem, and Justin Timberlake have each had the best-selling album of the year twice. (Timberlake’s tally combines his solo and *NSYNC careers.)

25 will, of course, also set a new record for the greatest first-week sales for an album by a female artist. In fact, it may well sell more copies than the current record-holder and runner-up combined. They are Britney Spears’s Oops!… I Did It Again, which sold 1,319,000 copies in its first week in May 2000, and Swift’s 1989, which sold 1,287,000 in its first week last November.

If 25 and 1989 wind up as the #1 and #2 albums of the year, which is virtually certain, this will mark the second time that Adele and Swift have finished in that order on Nielsen’s year-end sales reports. In 2012, 21 and Red were #1 and #2, respectively.

Also, this will be the latest in the year that an album has been released and wound up as that year’s top-seller. (25 was released on Nov. 20.) That record, too, is currently held by Swift, whose 1989 was released on Oct. 27, 2014.

25 may well become the first album in history to sell 1 million or more copies in each of its first two weeks of release. Sales of No Strings Attached plunged to 811K in its second week.

25 continues Adele’s strong upward sales progression. 21 sold 352K copies in its first week in February 2011 – and 730K in its peak week one year later after it swept the Grammy Awards. 21 has sold 11.23 million copies in the U.S., which makes it the 10th best-selling album of the Nielsen era.

Just three weeks ago, Adele broke the one-week sales record for a song in the digital era when her power ballad “Hello” sold 1.1 copies in its first week. (Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind ]97” got off to a faster start in 1997, selling 3.4 million copies in its first week, but that was in the era of physical product.)

With 25 coming right on the heels of Bieber’s Purpose, this will be the first time that two albums have debuted with sales of 500K or more in back-to-back weeks since June 2008, when Coldplay’s Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends sold 721K copies in its first week, one week after Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter III bowed with 1,006,000.

*NSYNC has held the one-week U.S. sales record so long that it’s hard to remember who held it before them. It was Backstreet Boys, whose sophomore album, Millennium, sold 1,134,000 copies in its first week in May 1999. The boy band swiped the record from Garth Brooks, whose Double Live sold 1,085,000 in its first week in November 1998. The country titan took the record from Whitney Houston’s The Bodyguard soundtrack, which sold 1,061,000 copies in its sixth week in January 1993.

Before Nielsen set up shop, the best documentation of the year’s best-selling albums was the Billboard year-end chart recaps. No individual artist or group ever had Billboard’s #1 album of the year three times. But Julie Andrews (who, like Adele, is from England) deserves a shout-out. The Broadway cast album to My Fair Lady, in which she starred with Rex Harrison, was the #1 album of both 1957 and 1958. The Broadway cast album to Camelot, in which she starred with Richard Burton and Robert Goulet, was the #1 “mono” album of 1961. The soundtrack to Mary Poppins, for which she won an Oscar, was the #1 album of 1965.