It sounds almost too incredible to be true...but then again, this is Adele, so anything is possible.
The British superstar’s new album, 25, has become the best-selling release of 2015, and it managed to do so in just three days. According to Nielsen, the album sold at least 2.3 million copies by Monday morning, which puts it well ahead of any other album’s numbers this year. If by-the-hour sales figures were public, it would be possible to figure out if it actually took less than three days for Adele to end up on top, but we may never know.
Before 25 arrived, Taylor Swift’s 1989 was 2015’s best-selling album, a title it earned last year. Back when the music industry still wasn’t sure if Adele was even going to release an album, it looked like 1989 might have been the rare record that was popular and powerful enough to be named the best-selling album two years in a row, but now that is no longer a possibility.
So far in 2015, Taylor Swift’s pop blockbuster has shifted around 1.8 million copies. Last year, in just a few months (it was released in October), the record moved over 3.5 million units, thanks mostly in part to her two massive number one hits, “Shake It Off” and “Blank Space.” While 1989 is slowly working its way down the charts—it just left the top ten recently after spending an entire year in the highest tier of the Billboard 200—it is possible that another single and the holiday season will propel it past the 2 million sales mark in 2015.
2015 has obviously been a fairly slow year for music sales, as aside from 25, no album released this year has been all that close to Swift’s 1989. The fourth quarter is typically when many of the biggest stars release their albums, but there aren’t currently many enormous projects expected, as plenty of labels rescheduled their drops to work around Adele’s schedule. A few artists have had especially impressive years in terms of album sales (Justin Bieber, Drake, The Weeknd), but none of them are likely to make a serious play for second place on the year-end list.
