In yet another chart-topping comeback, Adele’s latest album, 30, has been named the fastest-selling album of 2021 in both the United States and the United Kingdom.
Adele’s fourth studio album, which was released on November 19, quickly became the most successful album of the year in the United States, according to MRC statistics cited by Billboard.
According to CNN, “30” has already surpassed the other big releases of 2021 by selling more than 660,000 equivalent album copies, which includes audio and video streaming as well as individual track sales.
Adele debuted at the top of the albums chart in the United Kingdom, with 261,000 first-week sales, according to the Official Charts, which stated it was the highest first week for an album since Ed Sheeran’s “Divide” () in 2017.
The album’s lead single “Easy on Me” also claimed a sixth consecutive week at number one on the UK singles chart, after breaking the record for most streams in a single week after its release.
The Official Charts said Adele was the only female act with three or more studio albums to reach number one with all her records — a title she has now cemented further with “30,” which marks her fourth number one.
However, “30” has not quite hit the heights of Adele’s third studio album, “25,” which became the fastest-selling album of all time in both the US and the UK in 2015 — selling 800,000 copies in the UK and 3.3 million in the US.
Although this week’s album list in the United States has yet to be revealed, Adele is very certain to win her third straight number one album, and “Easy on Me” previously spent four weeks at the top of the Hot 100 singles chart.
Adele’s appreciation of traditional means of listening to music is reflected in the sales data, with 560,000 of the equivalent album units sold in the US being traditional album sales, while 67 percent of her sales in the UK were physical sales.
The artist had previously avoided streaming, but she appears to have embraced it at the expense of fewer physical sales, even convincing Spotify to remove the shuffle button as a default option for albums on their site.
“30” has received widespread acclaim from critics, and Adele told American Vogue in October that the album was her way of explaining her divorce to her son and was very close to her heart, saying she was “not letting go of this one.”
