Music industry waits to see if Adele streams new album

British singer’s success allows her to take risks with how latest songs are distributed

For Adele’s millions of fans, perhaps the biggest question about her next album is whether its songs will pack the same emotional wallop that helped make her last record a global smash.

But behind the scenes, music executives are anxiously awaiting another detail: whether Adele will make her new songs available on streaming services such as Spotify and Ap- ple Music or withhold them for a time to propel album sales. With two weeks left before the scheduled release of the album, titled 25, streaming services are still awaiting the final word.

Adele’s choice will reflect the music industry’s larger debate over how fully to embrace the streaming format. Elite artists such as Adele, Taylor Swift and Beyoncé still sell millions of albums on CD or via downloads, and by streaming their new songs immediately, they risk sacrificing those lucrative sales.

Through their success, those three women have also accumulated a rare level of power in the industry, al- lowing them to take risks with how their music is released and consumed, and the rest of the business has taken notice.

“If Adele decides to not have her music on streaming for a certain period of time, that is going to send a strong signal to other artists,” said Casey Rae, chief executive of the Future of Music Coalition, an artists’ advocacy group. “In reality, not all artists are able to make those same choices.”

With her last album, 21, released in early 2011, Adele scored the kind of blockbuster success that the industry had all but written off as extinct. It sold about 30 million copies around the world, making it one of the most popular releases in decades; in the United States, the majority of its 11 million sales were on CD.

But the landscape has changed in the music industry. Over the past decade, CD sales have declined by 80 per cent, while streaming now makes up 32 per cent of the annual revenue of record labels, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.

Adele’s new album, scheduled for release on Nov. 20, looks poised to be another giant hit. Its first single, “Hello,” featuring Adele’s powerfully emotive voice over spare piano chords, broke download and video- streaming records last month.

Adele’s position on streaming is unclear. When 21 came out, downloads were still an ascendant format and Spotify had not arrived in the United States. (Like other artists at the time, she withheld her album from Spotify for months, a move that has gradually gone out of fashion.)

Now, Spotify is just one of an array of streaming outlets that include Apple, Google, Rdio and Amazon.

Adele is said to be personally involved in deciding whether and how her music should be streamed — an unusual level of involvement for a major star in such a granular business issue.