Breanna Stewart
First week sale numbers are in and Adele continues to ascend to ground breaking new heights with her breakthrough new album, “25”.
The English soul singer’s third studio album, following the massive success of her international crossover, “21”, which spawned chart-toppers “Rolling in the Deep”, “Someone Like You”, and “Set Fire to the Rain”, has managed to top global sale charts worldwide.
According to Nielsen Music, within its first week of release, Adele’s, “25”, managed to sell more than 3.38 million copies in the United States alone, besting boy bands, N*SYNC’s record of 2.42 million copies sold for their then sophomore album, “No Strings Attached” from March 2000.
This record breaking number also surpasses Taylor Swift’s album, “1989”, a new direction into the pop genre for the country music singer, sale numbers of 1.8 million albums sold throughout the entire year of 2015.
Media Traffic, a permission-based contextual advertisement company, which tracks global sales numbers for both physical and digital music, has also tallied the results of “25”, and reports that the new album from Adele, real name, Adele Adkins, has sold more than 5.7 million albums worldwide since its release on Nov. 20, making 27-year old Adele one of the world’s best-selling artists today, alongside music peers Beyoncé, Jay-Z, Justin Bieber, and One Direction.
Daphne Hennis, a junior marketing major from Atlanta, is proud of Adele’s success and admits to purchasing the new album.
“I love Adele. I think her music is influential and it’s something new,” said Hennis. “I got the album the night it came out. I love ‘Hello’. It’s my favorite song from the album.”
“Hello”, the lead single from “25”, has also broken records alongside the album, as well. 24-hours after its release on Vevo Records, the single achieved more than 27.7 million views, once again besting the former record set by Swift’s “Bad Blood” music video, which accumulated 20.1 million views within the same time span
Lennie Milton, a freshman accounting major from Clinton, Miss., although a fan of Adele, wonders if the singer would garner the same worldwide acclaim and success had she been an African-American artist.
“Don’t get me wrong, I love Adele,” said Milton. “But when Beyoncé came out with her album (Beyoncé), it sold 828,000 copies in 3 days, but it took her another year to reach the same 5 million that Adele has already surpassed. I don’t know, but it kind of makes you wonder.”
Another JSU student and Jackson native, Alisa Kitchens, a music education major, also shares Milton’s sentiments, and ponders why black artists, with similar sounds and voices, do not receive the same mainstream attention that Adele has received.
“We invented music,” said Kitchens. “R & B, soul, that is our genre. You have Ne-Yo’s, Jazmine Sullivan’s, Fantasia’s, Ledisi’s, who sound just like her, who put just as much work and effort into their albums, and they only sell 30,000 copies in the first week, if that. What does that really say?”
However Jeoffrey Lewis, also a music education major and self-recording artist, believes that Adele’s marketing is to be credited for her success.
“You’ve got black artists that have the same sound, true, but they don’t do a good job of promoting themselves,” said Lewis, a Magnolia, Miss. native. “Adele has been everywhere. She’s been on ‘Saturday Night Live’, she’s been promoting her album on social media, she’s been everywhere. Sometimes, unless I check iTunes, I would never know that Tyrese has an album out.”
And although Lewis believes that Adele is blurring the color lines for her music, he boasts that her talent as a once in a lifetime artist who deviates from the status quo, cannot be denied.
“Adele sounds black. The first time I heard a song from her, I thought she was black. People like that,” said Lewis. “People also can identify with her music and she’s singing about love and heartbreak, not sex, guns, and drugs. That doesn’t happen anymore. Artists today have to have vulgarity to sell. Adele, to her credit, does none of that. She sings and that’s it.”
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