![]() Meanwhile, the total 25 racked up in its debut, 3.38 million, is four and a half times the size of 21’s peak-prime evidence of an AC/DC-style album that could open huge but eventually fall short of its slower-but-bigger-selling predecessor.įair enough, but sales in the millions do not automatically vouch for an album’s quality. ![]() Its highest-selling week, 730,000 copies, came in early 2012, one year into its run, right after it won the Album of the Year Grammy. ![]() Already, 25 looks like the AC/DC Rule on steroids: Adele’s 2011 album 21 was a megablockbuster but a more steady seller, never shifting a million albums all at once. They open to bigger numbers than the prior album ever saw in a week, but fall short over the long haul (the way, say, Lady Gaga’s huge-opening Born This Way ultimately sold about half as much as its slower-growing predecessor The Fame). It also explains why so many follow-up albums are heavily front-loaded. 1 with the album released after their most famous and best-selling album, the AC/DC Rule states that initial sales of an album are a referendum on the public’s feelings about the act’s prior album, not the current one. Named for a rock band who scored their first No. This is actually one of my pet theories, one I have used to explain the opening sales of many albums over the years. 1 this week, Justin Bieber’s Purpose, which debuted last week to a very respectable half-million in sales, likely to an army of millennials. Besides, news flash: When they are motivated, under-30s do still buy records, like Taylor Swift’s 1989-not to mention the album Adele knocks out of No. What made 21 so huge were big, dominant Top 40 hits-songs teens and twentysomethings were likely to hear-and 25 already has one such smash on it. Jones, in short, is a bit of a cautionary tale: Grayhead loyalty certainly helps an artist, but it can’t sustain a megablockbuster career. But that sophomore disc by Jones topped out at only four million total, she never scored a serious radio hit, and her career since has been much more modest. ![]() As I noted on a recent Slate Culture Gabfest, Jones sold an Adele-size 10 million of her Grammy-dominating 2002 debut Come Away with Me, and when she returned in 2004, Feels Like Home debuted to over a million in first-week sales. The list of all-time chart achievements in 25’s first week is a mile long: the first album to sell three million in a week in SoundScan history the first album to outsell the rest of the Billboard 200 albums- combined more compact discs sold (1.7 million CDs) than any album in 14 years, and the most digital albums sold (1.6 million downloads) in any week, ever.īut the same was true a decade ago of Norah Jones- remember her?-the early-aughts lite-jazz queen of Starbucks CD racks and NPR pledge drives. (What was I saying a few weeks ago about this lady and grand entrances?) That brain-melting total-the biggest sales week in Nielsen SoundScan history, and quite possibly all of chart history, for a music album-not only surpassed but annihilated the seemingly indomitable benchmark of 2.416 million copies ’N Sync’s No Strings Attached sold in the spring of 2000. In Adele’s case, truly explosive: Billboard and Nielsen report that, in just seven days, Adele sold 3.378 million copies of her third album, 25. So, what pop act am I describing: Adele, or ’N Sync?Īll of the above could apply to either of them: the diamond-level sales for a prior album, and the progenitor acts they outdistanced ( Backstreet Boys for ’N Sync, Amy Winehouse for Adele) the stopgap soundtrack hits and holiday releases the long career pause (in ’N Sync’s case, over a fight with a corrupt manager and a label switch for Adele, throat surgery, a baby, and a bout of career ennui) and finally, the explosive, expectation-shattering chart return. ![]()
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