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Adele's Album Storms In At Number One, Bringing '21' Along With It

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As has been predicted since before it was even properly announced, Adele’s 25 has topped the Billboard 200 in spectacular fashion. The powerhouse album shifted an unprecedented 3.48 million copies in its first tracking week, which is enough to secure the number one spot many, many times over.

25 wasn’t available on streaming services, but lead single “Hello” is, and the sustained popularity of that song added a fair number of equivalent album sales to Adele’s total. Between track equivalent albums (adding up a certain number of sales of individual songs as opposed to albums in order to equate to one “album sale”) and streaming equivalent albums (the same idea, but with streaming), another 104,000 equivalent albums were added to the 3.38 million copies that 25 actually sold, bringing the final tally up to just around 3.48 million.

104,000 units may not sound like a lot when compared to three million, but that number is actually greater than the first week sales of some albums that debuted atop the Billboard 200 earlier this year in off-peak seasons.

Last week’s number one album, Justin Bieber’s sixth number one Purpose, drops just one spot, but still manages to move just under 300,000 copies in its second week. That’s less than one third of his original, impressive 649,000, but it’s not shabby. Immediately behind him is One Direction and their latest effort Made In The AM, which lost out to Bieber in their pop music arms race last week.

Rapper Jadakiss returns after a several year hiatus with his latest, Top 5 Dead Or Alive, which debuts at number four with a respectable 66,000 units shifted. He was last seen in the top ten back in 2009 with his album The Last Kiss.

Chart holdovers control the next few spots in the upper reaches of the albums chart, and they include The Weeknd’s Beauty Behind The Madness (number five), Pentatonix’s That’s Christmas To Me (number six—look out for this one to sell particularly well this coming holiday season, by the way), and Chris Stapleton’s surprise success Traveller is down to number seven.

New age star Enya is also back in the top ten this week with her first album in seven years, Dark Sky Island. The long-awaited comeback album begins at number eight this week.

Adele garnered so much attention this week that it spurred the sales of her previous two albums, both of which have already had extremely successful charting and sales tenures. This week, 21 is back at number nine, which gives the album an 82nd nonconsecutive week in the top ten. Despite the fact that 21 has been available for years and that it has already sold over 11 million copies in the US alone, the world-dominating record shifted another 46,000 units this week.

Rounding out the top ten is Fetty Wap’s continually-successful self-titled debut, which rises from number eleven to number ten this sales frame.