LOS ANGELES — Adele’s third studio album, “25,” has been available since Nov. 20, and it’s already poised to break *NSYNC’s longstanding one-week U.S. album sales record of 2.42 million copies sold.
According to Billboard, Adele’s whopping 900,000-plus copies sold through the iTunes Store on the album’s first day of availability portends a first-week total above 2.5 million in pure album sales alone.
*NSYNC holds the current record for the Nielsen era; the boy band’s “No Strings Attached” bowed in 2000 with 2,416,000 copies sold. Not only was it the largest sales week for an album since Nielsen Music began tracking purchases in 1991, but it remains the only album to have sold two million copies in one week domestically.
Should estimates hold, “25” will easily be the largest release of the year, blowing past Taylor Swift’s “1989,” which has sold more than 1.7 million copies in 2015. Adele’s previous album, 2011’s “21,” spent 24 nonconsecutive weeks at No. 1 on the U.S. album sales chart, the most weeks atop the list for an album by a female artist. That release is the tenth-biggest album of the Nielsen era, having sold 11.23 million copies domestically.
It’s worth noting that “25” won’t be available on Apple Music, Spotify or other major streaming services, at least at first.