Adele's '25' First Week US Sales: 3.38M

Adele’s 25 album makes a truly historic debut at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart. The set -- released on Nov. 20 through XL/Columbia Records -- earned 3.48 million equivalent album units in the week ending Nov. 26, according to Nielsen Music. Of that figure, Billboard reports 3.38 million were in pure album sales ­-- the single largest sales week for an album since Nielsen began tracking point-of-sale music purchases in 1991.

The Billboard 200 chart ranks the most popular albums of the week based on multi-metric consumption, which includes traditional album sales, track equivalent albums (TEA) and streaming equivalent albums (SEA). The new Dec. 12-dated chart (where Adele is No. 1) will be posted in full to Billboard’s websites on Tuesday, Dec. 1.

It almost goes without saying that 25’s equivalent album unit figure of 3.48 million is also the largest registered since the chart began tracking weekly popularity based on overall units in December of 2014. (A week ago, Justin Bieber set the former record of 649,000 units, when his Purpose album debuted at No. 1.)

Sales Highlights include:

• 25 sold 3.33m copies in its opening week in the US market, according to sales monitor BuzzAngle, and 3.38m according to Nielsen. That’s real sales, not ‘consumption equivalents’.
• 51% of those sales were on physical formats – a total CD and vinyl tally of 1,682,840.
• 49% came on download sites like iTunes – making up the remaining 1,645,152.
• Adele’s first day US album sales, 1.49M, were better than the first week album sales for any album of the last 15 years.
• Adele’s physical album sales alone would have been the fourth-best selling debut week album of the last 25 years in the US.
• The hullabaloo around 25 also drew significant US sales to Adele’s previous albums: according to BuzzAngle, 21 sold 33,485 last week in the US, while 19 sold 19,860.
• Adele “25” represented 67.1% of the total sales of the Top 200 albums in the US last week.