Adele’s fourth studio album 30 debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 after moving a staggering 839,000 equivalent album units, making it the biggest sales week this year, Billboard reports.
The previous mark was 613,000 units by Drake’s Certified Lover Boy. It’s the largest sales week for any album since 2017 when Taylor Swift’s Reputation pushed over 1.2 million units.
Swift’s Red (Taylor’s Version) set the record last week for most traditional album sales earned with 369,000, only to see 30 nearly double that total with 692,000 in its first week. That massive sum also exceeds the total sales of any album over the last 11 months combined. The album figures for 30 are broken down into 205,000 digital sales and 487,000 physical copies, which consists of 378,000 CDs, 108,000 vinyl LPs, and just under 2,000 cassette tapes.
Red (Taylor’s Version) managed to barely hold onto its vinyl sales record of 114,000 in a single week. Adele’s latest offering amassed 141,000 SEA units, which equals 185.39 million on-demand streams of the album’s 12 songs. The remaining 6,000 is comprised of TEA units. Billboard notes that her last album, 25, wasn’t available to listen to in full until seven months later.
While 30 could be listened to in its entirety on streaming services, Adele also got Spotify to remove its shuffle feature, explaining that “our stories should be listened to as we intended.”
“This was the only request I had in our ever-changing industry,” Adele wrote on Twitter. “We don’t create albums with so much care and thought into our track listing for no reason. Our art tells a story and our stories should be listened to as we intended. Thank you Spotify for listening.”
