Your Weekly Chart Update AKA What Record Did Adele Break This Time?
We usually cover the weekly music charts in The Week In Pop, but that column remains on hiatus until January. Yet the charts keep on rolling through the holidays, and this holiday season, Adele keeps on dominating them. Her album 25 rules the Billboard 200 albums chart for a fifth straight week, and “Hello” tops the Hot 100 singles chart for the ninth consecutive frame. Both the album and the song debuted at #1, and neither has budged since.
What record has Ms. Adkins broken now? Per Billboard, 25 sold 1.15 million copies the week leading up to Christmas, making it the first album to ever sell a million copies in three separate weeks. As of 12/24, it has sold 7.13 million copies in the US, making it the first album to sell more than 7 million copies in a year since Usher’s Confessions tallied 7.979 million in 2004. During this final sales frame of 2015, as Americans cash in their gift cards and flood into big box stores, 25 may have a shot at eclipsing the 8 million mark, a feat no album has managed in one year since NSYNC’s No Strings Attached sold 9.936 million in 2000. Imagine how many copies Adele could have racked up in 2015 if she had released this thing before mid-November.
Elsewhere in the top 10, Chris Brown’s Royalty debuts at #3 with 184,000 equivalent units (162,000 in pure sales), and the Star Wars: The Force Awakens soundtrack enters at #5 with 100,000 units (94,000 in sales).
Any significant action to report on the Hot 100 besides the continued reign of “Hello,” which Billboard tells us is now the longest-running #1 single by a solo female since Lorde’s “Royals” in 2013? Well, Justin Bieber again claims three of America’s top 5 songs, with “Sorry” at #2, “Love Yourself” at #3 (a new peak), and “What Do You Mean?” at #5, and “Sorry” might still have enough steam to finally dethrone “Hello” next week. Alessia Cara’s “Here” climbs to #7, its highest placement yet. And just outside the top 10 are lurking Drake and Future’s “Jumpman” (#12) and Twenty One Pilots’ “Stressed Out” (#13).