Adele
As expected, Adele easily debuts at #1 on this week’s Billboard 200 chart with her new album 30, with the biggest overall week of 2021. It is her third #1 album and arrives with 839,000 equivalent album units earned, surpassing this year’s record of 613,000 units earned by Drake when Certified Lover Boy landed in September.
Of 30‘s 839,000 equivalent album units earned, album sales comprise 692,000 units, making it the biggest-selling album of the year after just one week. The previous largest sales week of 2021 happened just a week prior, as Taylor Swift‘s Red (Taylor’s Version) sold 369,000 copies. Billboard also notes that 30‘s sales numbers immediately make it the biggest-selling album of the entire year, surpassing the total sales of any album over the past 11 months combined. Up until now, the biggest-selling album this year was Swift’s Evermore, released in late 2020, which has sold 471,000 copies this year. Additionally, 30‘s first-week sales figure is the largest since 2017, when Taylor Swift once again had the largest sales number, as Reputation moved 1.216 million copies in its first week on sale that November.
Billboard also breaks down the different types of sales of 30, with physical album sales accounting for 487,000 of that figure (378,000 in CDs; 108,000 in vinyl LPs; and just under 2,000 in cassette tapes) and digital album sales making up 205,000 units.
As for the rest of the chart, the aforementioned Red (Taylor’s Version) moves from #1 to #2 with 159,000 equivalent album units, followed by Drake’s Certified Lover Boy at #3, then Silk Sonic‘s debut An Evening With Silk Sonic at #4. Country star Morgan Wallen is at #5, with Summer Walker at #6.
The second-highest debut of the week comes from Robert Plant & Alison Krauss with Raise the Roof at #7. It is the follow-up to 2007’s hit record Raising Sand, which earned the duo the Grammy for Album of the Year.
Olivia Rodrigo is at #8 with Sour. It’s time once again for Michael Bublé‘s holiday album Christmas to fly up the charts, as it reached #9 this week. The top 10 is filled out by The Weeknd‘s best-of set The Highlights, thanks to its newly released vinyl edition.
