No one is taking it easy on Adele this holiday season. After a bicoastal TV push, an Instagram Live charm offensive, and perhaps causing the worldwide vinyl shortage, 30 is Adele’s third Billboard No. 1 album. The “divorce, baby” album moved 839,000 units this week with pure sales of 692,000. (The Billboard 200 counts album sales, individual song sales, and streams.) Per the magazine, the album was the biggest week of the year for any album, surpassing Drake’s Certified Lover Boy by over 200,000 units.
The 692,000 albums sold is almost double what Red (Taylor’s Version) sold in its debut last week. Of the almost 700,000 albums sold, 108,000 were vinyl LPs. Some 500,000 copies of 30 were pressed in vinyl earlier this year, so there’s still time to get your supply-chain-crimping curio. 30 has the second highest one-week vinyl sales since MRC Data began tracking it in 1991. The number one? Red (Taylor’s Version). On an odd note, almost 2,000 of the albums sold were cassettes. Which is just baffling.
