Adele ascends
How the British ballad-belter topped a Céline Dion sales record and beat ’N Sync in their heyday
In the Nov. 21 Saturday Night Live sketch “A Thanksgiving Miracle,” an awkward Thanksgiving is saved when a family’s political squabbles are interrupted by Adele’s “Hello.” As the soaring ballad plays from a clunky old CD player, the family (including Matthew McConaughey in grandpa garb) leaps from their seats for a sepiadrenched, wind-machine-assisted singalong.
This week proved it: Adele is someone we can all agree on.
On Wednesday, Nielsen reported that Adele’s album 25 sold 260,000 copies in Canada alone in just five days, breaking Céline Dion’s 230,000 first-week sales record for 1997’s Let’s Talk About Love.
South of the border, Adele beat out ’N Sync’s single-week sales record — in three days — by selling more than 2.4 million copies.
Nielsen has collected stats on first-week sales only since 1991 in the U.S. and 1995 in Canada — we’ll never know where preSoundscan blockbusters such as Michael Jackson’s Bad would rank.
Supplanting the chest-pounding diva and the heartthrob boy band was a feat considered impossible in a world of music freebies. Here are five ways that Adele made chart miracles happen.
Adele for all “Adele’s music is popular with all demographics,” says Anita McOuat, partner at PwC and editor of PwC’s Entertainment & Media Outlook 2015-19. “My 4-year-old loves her music. But she’s popular with people in their 40s and 50s and maybe even beyond.”
Her diverse fan base means she can afford to overstep streaming. “Many of the older demographic still buy CDs and still pay to download from iTunes or other digital services,” says McOuat.
Bye bye bye to boy bands? Though Adele dethroned ’N Sync in the U.S., make no mistake: Teenage girls have not abandoned their historic throttle on the music industry.
McOuat notes that ’N Sync heir apparent Justin Bieber just charted17 singles simultaneously on the Billboard Hot 100, breaking a record set by the Beatles.
But people today prefer to binge-listen to their ballads as whole albums, while choosing their pop hits à la carte from digital or streaming services. There’s no guarantee that Justin Timberlake and Co. would sell as well today if you could buy “Bye Bye Bye” unbundled from, say, “Just Got Paid.”
“A very successful pop record driven by a whole bunch of really strong singles, you look at how that would be consumed today,” notes David Bakula, a music analyst for Nielsen. “It’s a different time.”
Off stream While Bieber may be slam-dunking streaming records, you don’t make Adele money by just giving heartache away for free. She famously pulled 25 from streaming, and can you blame her?
The Copyright Board of Canada ruled in May 2014 that artists would receive just 10 cents per every 1,000 streams of a song. That’s more than 60 hours of music for every dime an artist gets out of the $24-million Canadian streaming market, calculated by PwC. As hot as “Hello” Lead single “Hello” has been No. 1 on the Billboard Canada Hot 100 chart for four weeks. “The outpouring of love for Adele was enormous before people even heard (the song),” says Taylor Jukes, program director at Toronto’s Virgin Radio. “Once they heard it they fell in love.”
Jukes, who predicts “Hello” will have legs well into 2016, says the public appetite is enormous. “We try to play it almost hourly if we can,”she says. Lucky 21 Even more persuasive than a killer first single? An instant classic album owned by1.5-million Canadians. “When you talk about what they are doing right with 25, you have to go back and look at all of the things they did right with 21,” says Nielsen’s Bakula. “That’s where the base for this was built.”