It's only been on sale for two days, but Adele's new album, 25, is already predicted to break N'SYNC's industry record of 2.42 million sold in a single week in the Nielson era. 25 was just released on Friday (Nov. 20) but fans burned through 900,000 copies from the iTunes store on the very first day that it was made available. 25 is Adele's third studio album and was released through XL/Columbia Records.
According to Billboard, N'SYNC is the current record holder for most amount of sales per week since Nielson Music began monitoring it in 1991. Nielson Music began this monitoring in order to track point-of-sale purchases, and before 1991, is was not known how many copies of album were sold in one week. The current state of tracking services is now known as the "Nielson era." N'SYNC snagged this record with their album, No Strings Attached, which sold 2,416,000 the week that it was released.
If 25 performs the way that it is forecasted to, it will become the 20th album to break over a million units in one week during the Nielson era. It may even best Taylor Swift's smash album, 1989, and become the best-selling album of 2015.
For the release of 25, Adele made the elevated decision not to make the album available on streaming services such as Spotify, TIDAL or Apple Music. Adele and her team making the decision to make the album unavailable for streaming was not a surprise and the singer was reportedly a big part of it.
Her last album, 21, was also not on streaming services until at least a year after its release. 21 bested 1.1 million copies during its debut week in 2010 and ended up selling 10 million altogether in the US. While 21 did exceptionally well sales wise, if you listen to the Nielson music predictions, 25 will outshine it by far.
