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Updated: Two Staggering Stats That Illustrate How Remarkable Adele's Sales Are

This article is more than 8 years old.

For those not in the music industry, the record-breaking sales of Adele’s 25 are a nice story and a sign that quality still means something when it comes to consumers’ musical preference.

For those of us  who cover the music business, Adele’s success is something much more exhilarating. It’s like getting to see a unicorn or Halley’s Comet or a once-in-a-lifetime storm of the century.

Though official numbers won’t be in for a week, it looks like 25 will sell more than 2.5 million in its first week, surpassing ’N Sync’s record of 2.42 million for a single sales week with No Strings Attached in 2000.  Adele’s set sold more than 900,000 via iTunes on day of release, Nov. 20, in the U.S. (Update: As of Tuesday morning, 25 has officially sold more than 2.43 million in its first two days of release, breaking 'N Sync's record, according to SoundScan. The final number when the chart closes Thursday night is expected to be around 2.9 million, reports Billboard).

Album sales have been in freefall—sometimes in double digits year-over-year, sometimes only mildly so— since 2000. Albums whose first-week sales numbers 15 years ago would land them at No. 100 or so now come in at No. 1.

Here are two stats that will help put Adele’s feat into perspective: So far this year, three albums have surpassed a million units in sales: Taylor Swift’s 1989, which came out last year, but has continued to sell well this year; Drake’s If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late, which, until 25, was the only album released this calendar year to sell a million copies; and now 25.  (The only other albums possibly looking at moving 1 million units  by Dec. 31 are Justin Bieber’s Purpose, which sold a staggering 649,000 last week,  One Direction’s Made in the A.M. and Luke Bryan’s Kill The Lights.)

Here come the stats:

*In merely one week of release, Adele’s 25 will become the best-selling album of the year, eclipsing the sales of every other album, many of which have been out all 48 weeks of 2015. If we low ball her final figure for the week at 2.5 million, she will still be 700,000 units ahead of Swift’s 1989, which has sold 1.74 million copies of its more than 5 million total in 2015, according to Billboard.

*Want to see just had badly album sales have dropped off? As I mentioned, above, three albums have sold more than 1 million units in 2015. Guess how many achieved that mark in 2000? 88. You read that right. The music industry has gone from having 88 titles sell at least 1 million copies in 2000 to only three. And these three include both track equivalent album sales and streaming equivalent album sales…

Rather sobering, isn’t it? Though the industry has already changed to a singles-based download business (and is rapidly shifting to a streaming economy),  seeing the actual stat really hammers home what a cataclysmic shift has happened in a relatively short period of time. And makes Adele’s accomplishment all the more staggering. Of course, not being available on streaming services presumably boosted her numbers, but it's impossible to know that for sure. Bieber's Purpose was available for streaming upon release and he still racked up the best first-week sales of 2015 (until later this week when Adele officially grabs the crown).

What impact will Adele’s album sales have? Other than to help a lot of folks  at retail and at Sony have a happier holiday, the effect won’t have any kind of pass along simply because she has now established herself as a once-in-a-generation kind of artist. But it’s sure nice to know that an artist can still capture people’s hearts like that, isn’t it?

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