Adele shatters ‘truisms’ by going against the grain
There is no one in music quite like Adele. While stars are now expected to live their lives in full self-promotion mode online, Adele barely touches her social media accounts.
A 27-year-old mother who speaks with a working-class North London accent, she is revered by fans as much for her seeming approachability as for her vocal prowess. In interviews she speaks about being a full-figured woman in the image-obsessed entertainment industry and about rejecting product endorsements to keep the focus on her music.
She also sells more albums than anyone in the struggling music business thought was still possible.
When official sales numbers are announced by Nielsen tomorrow, they are expected to show that Adele’s new album 25, which went on sale on Nov 20, is expected to sell at least 3.2 million copies in the United States in its first week. That smashes an opening-week sales record that has stood since ’N Sync sold 2.4 million copies of No Strings Attached in 2000. But annual CD sales then were more than five times what they are now and the music industry relied on a vast network of brick-and-mortar retailers that has long since eroded.
“This is beyond all expectations,” said Ish Cuebas, vice-president for music merchandising at Trans World Entertainment, whose more than 300 stores include the F.Y.E. chain.
Since 1991, when SoundScan — a tracking service now owned by Nielsen — began collecting reliable sales data from retailers, only 20 albums have sold more than one million copies in a week. Three Taylor Swift albums accomplished that feat, though none had sales that approached the stratospheric figures for 25. Target and Barnes & Noble both said that first-day sales for 25 at their stores exceeded those of any previous album.
Adele’s 25 also had the biggest opening week in Britain, where more than 800,000 albums were sold, according to the Official Charts Co there. That beat a record set in 1997 by Oasis, which sold 696,000 copies of Be Here Now in an abbreviated three-day sales week.
With positive reviews, a hit song — Hello, already the subject of a Saturday Night Live sketch — and saturation coverage of Adele from an adoring news media, the album should remain a hit through the holiday season.
Analysts expect it to sell five million copies or more in the United States by the end of the year, a milestone that has not been reached since 2011. That hot-selling album was Adele’s previous release 21, another trend-defying phenomenon that went on to sell about 30 million copies around the world.
On Thursday, Adele announced she would go on tour for the first time in five years, all but guaranteeing heavy promotion for the album well into 2016 and perhaps beyond.
Adele’s 25 — filled with confessional torch songs and heart-tugging ballads, and driven by Adele’s powerful and soulful voice — is being celebrated throughout the music world as an artistic and commercial success that has become all too rare. And huge numbers of listeners who otherwise have spent little or no money on music are plunking down US$10 (360 baht) or more for the album.
“There are people out there for whom this may be the only record they’ve bought in five years,” said David Bakula, a senior analyst at Nielsen. “The last one may have been 21, and now they’re coming back in force.”
The success of Adele’s 25 is all the more remarkable given how the landscape of music retail has changed since 2000, when some 700 million CDs were sold annually through a network of chains like Tower, Sam Goody and HMV, as well as in big-box stores like Best Buy and Circuit City that devoted considerable floor space to music.
Today, with digital outlets like iTunes, Amazon and Spotify having upended the way that music is distributed and consumed, thousands of record stores across the country have closed and the music acreage at the big boxes has been sharply reduced.
Last year only 141 million CDs were sold in the United States, according to Nielsen. An additional 106 million albums were sold as downloads.
But Adele appears to have activated millions of customers for whom making a purchase is viewed as a sign of devotion and support for the artist they love.
“There’s a level of respect by buying the song, rather than just streaming it,” said one fan, Carlos Villa. “I acknowledge the work that you put into this song, and I appreciate you for that.”
Mr Villa, a 29-year-old who works as an administrator at New York University, said he placed an advance order for 25 as soon as it became available on iTunes, and also ordered a CD from Amazon. He would have also bought a vinyl LP, he said, “but I don’t have one of those players”.
In an interview on NBC’s Today show on Wednesday, Adele hinted at the reason for releasing the single but not the album that way, saying she viewed streaming sites as being like radio — a promotional platform.