Adele’s new album ’25’ may break ‘impossible’ sales record

“For Adele fans, it’s been a torturous four-year wait for new music. But the wait is finally over. The British sensation’s latest album, ’25,’ releases online and in stores Friday, November 20th,” Deirdre Hughes reports for Yahoo News. “If you’re wondering who still buys physical CDs, you might be surprised to learn that the balance between physical and digital music sales, while shifting, still heavily favors CDs.”

“Even in that context, Columbia Records will ship 3.6 million physical copies of ’25,’ according to Billboard. That is a staggering number by current industry standards. It will be the most CDs shipped for a new release since the 4.2 million copies of *NSYNC’s ‘No Strings Attached’ in 2000,” Hughes reports. “To put that in some perspective, iTunes didn’t even exist in 2000. (It was released on January 9, 2001.)”

“If ’25’ lives up to the hype, it could break first-week sales records. That’s a feat many industry watchers thought would never happen again, thanks to a precipitous decline in music sales since digital began taking over,” Hughes reports. “If Adele reaches the targets executives at Sony Music expect, she could break *NSYNC’s first-week record of 2.4 million albums sold in its first week in March of 2000. Sony expects sales of 1.5 million physical CDs in the first week and Apple digital sales of 900,000. That would put her dangerously close to *NSYNC’s record of 2.5 million for ‘No Strings Attached.'”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Note: Apple’s iTunes Store has posted a 57:29 minute interview conducted by Beats 1’s Zane Lowe and Adele. Watch it here.

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Adele rejects streaming music services, including Apple Music, for ‘25’ – November 19, 2015