Adele's 25 has officially made history by becoming the first album to sell more than 3 million copies in its first week. '25', which is the singer's third studio album, was released on November 20 through XL Recordings/Columbia Records and has sold approximately 3.38 million copies in its first week in the US.
This data was obtained by Billboard from Nielsen Music, the authority responsible for tracking point-of-sale music purchases since the early '90s. Nielsen has a tracking week that runs from Friday up to the next Thursday. This means, they tracked the sales of Adele's album from its release on November 20 up to the closing of their frame on November 26.
Now on its second week, forecasters in the music industry predict that the album could sell another 1 million copies which would make it the first album to sell a million copies in more than a week. The results will be revealed after sales from '25''s second week will be tabulated by Nielsen on Thursday, December 3.
As of November 30, however, Billboard published that Adele's '25' has already moved over 4 million copies in the US and this number keeps climbing each day. As a matter of fact, the only albums to sell at least 4 million copies in a year since 2006, have all been titles by the singer. Aside from 25 in 2015, Adele's '21' sold 4.45 million copies in 2012 and 5.82 million copies in 2011.
In addition, Market Watch reported that Adele's '25' album account for 41 percent of all albums that sold last week in the US and 48 percent of all digit album sales nationwide.
Based on Nielsen's data, *NSYNC's No Strings Attached used to be the title-holder of the album with the most first-week sales. Apparently, in March 26, 2000 the boy band's album sold an estimated 2.42 million copies in the US during its first week.
Adele's '25' also surpassed Taylor Swift's '1989' as the biggest selling album of 2015. Swift's album only sold 1.8 million copies.
