Thus, 25 is already only the second album to sell more than 2 million copies in a single week since Nielsen Music began tracking sales in 1991.
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Adele, who took a career break to have her first child, says in a BBC television interview to be aired on Friday that the success of “21” was daunting, but she was determined to make a comeback.
Bieber won the race for the hearts and dollars of young female music fans against One Direction, whose Made In The A.M. finished its first week of release with 34,866 sales.
They are the only two albums ever to have sold more than 500,000 copies in a week in the UK.
Releasing music via streaming services is the most common way for new music to debut today.
In isolation, these figures are impressive, but against the backdrop of massively declining album sales over the past five years, such predictions are unprecedented for an album released in 2015.
Since the artist initially focused on securing a sponsorship from Apple for her next tour, Spotify’s chances to now regain Adele for its platform seem flaky.
Country-turned-pop star Swift has done it with her last three albums in 2014, 2012 and 2010. The NY Times report also noted that a spokesperson from Target, the U.S.-based big-box chain which is selling an exclusive version of the CD with three extra songs, said that 25 had the “biggest opening-day sales of an album in the store’s history”.
Billboard magazine, which runs the benchmark USA chart, predicted that “25” would sell around 2.9 million copies in its first week in the United States.
“Unlike film though, which enjoys the luxury of an event-based form of windowing in the form of cinema which enforces how people first can see most movies, music by and large is governed by how you, as a fan, listen”.
Singer Taylor Swift too, had pulled her music from Spotify, over complaints about the royalties paid by streaming outlets.
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“It’s a great way of getting stuff out there”, she said of the social media site at the time.
