Adele's '25' Breaks First Week Records for Best-Selling Album of All Time

There’s no denying Adele a place in the pantheon of the most successful artists of all time with the latest figures showing her record-breaking first week album sales, more than any other album ever. According to Billboard, the final numbers from Neilsen Music came in at 3.38 million copies sold in its first week in the U.S. alone, making it the only album ever to sell more than three million in its first week, and one of only two albums to sell more than 2 million, the other one being N*SYNC’s No Strings Attached from 15 years ago which clocked in at 2.42 million. The figures are also the highest recorded since Nielsen began tracking point-of-sale music purchases in 1991, with sales almost evenly split between physical (51 percent) and digital (49 percent). These numbers are also significant in bucking the trend of declining album sales, which have decreased from 700 million CDs sold annually at the turn of the millennium, to combined digital and physical album sales of 247 million last year.