Despite only releasing four studio albums in a span of 14 years, Adele is already one of the most successful female artists of all-time.

After the madness around her former albums 21 and 25, we check in-depth statistics of 30 to see how successful the album has been since its release last fall.

Adele started career in 2008 with 19, a record that was hugely successful in the Netherlands on top of also doing wonders in her native country, the UK.

The album was so huge in the Netherlands that it ended up becoming the top seller of 2009.

That being said, it would take at least another pair of years for the British songstress to truly find global success.

The release of her blockbuster album, 21, was an immediate success that would dominate the charts for many years to come.

It goes without saying that it was by far the best-selling record of 2011, shifting a massive 18.1 million copies as per the IFPI. It didn't stop there, though.

The record shifted another 8.3 million in 2012, giving Adele the top seller of the year for consecutive years. It also pulled huge amounts in 2013 before eventually surpassing the 30 million mark years later. Simply outstanding results.

Many people deemed Adele as a 'one era wonder' and argued she'd never replicate that success again, however, the chanteuse returned nearly 5 years later in November 2015, with the fastest selling album ever, 25, further proving her out of this world dominance was far from being over.

This time around, with 30, everyone expected her to break records effortlessly. Doubts were set on how likely this was to happen considering that pure sales are now a relic from the past. So, how has it done?

As usual, I'll be using the Commensurate Sales to Popularity Concept in order to relevantly gauge her results. This concept will not only bring you sales information for all Adele's albums, physical and download singles, as well as audio and video streaming. In fact, it will also determine their true popularity.

If you are not yet familiar with the CSPC method, below is a nice and short video of explanations. I fully recommend watching it before getting into the sales figures. Of course, if you are a regular visitor feel free to skip the video and get into the numbers directly.

The Commensurate Sales to Popularity Concept (CSPC)

There are two ways to understand this revolutionary concept. In the first place, there is this Scribe video posted below. If you are unaware of the CSPC method, you will get the full idea within just a pair of minutes.

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If you are a mathematical person, and want to know the full method as well as formulas, you can read the full introduction article.

Now let's get into the artist's sales figures in detail in order to apply this concept and define the act's true popularity!

Adele Album Sales

Original Album Sales - Comments

As already mentioned above, 21's sales are just out of this world. There is no need to mention no album did better since several years.

In fact, the last studio album selling more than this LP is Shania Twain's Come On Over, released way back in November 1997 and selling over 33 million.

Her debut album, 19, benefited from Adele's sophomore effort smashing, as more than half of its sales were registered after her global breakthrough in 2011.

25 was an incredible follow up that further solidified Adele as one of the most powerful artists of all-time, it's now on its way to reach 21 million.

Outside of her own 21, it is the top selling studio album since Norah Jones' classic Jazz record Come Away With Me at nearly 24 million.

Obviously, numbers are way down for 30 with close to 3.4 million sales. It had to be expected considering the market evolution in recent years. We should also keep in mind that this album was available on streaming platforms from day one unlike 21 and 25.

The figure is still disappointed, as shown by the 1-million gap to IFPI's annual figure, which highlights that the album sales are below expectations, with many initial shipments yet to be sold, or returned, 7 months after the initial release.

Adele songs sales

Physical Singles

As a reminder, the weighting is done with a 10 to 3 ratio between one album and one physical single.

Well, if there is one area where Adele hasn't dominated, that is physical single sales.

With the last few consumers giving up the format in the late 00s, and her success being limited by that point, her singles from 19 accumulated low sales in the format.

By 2011 most markets had completely stopped releasing this format. Only Japan still had notable physical single sales, but this country is the only one that pretty much resisted the Adele earthquake. 

All in all, the few sales here and there amount for 185,000 singles sales from promotional campaigns of 19 and 21 combined. No single from 25 was issued physically.

Skyfall, as a James Bond theme, was issued physically all over the world in large quantities. There are plenty of people collecting such songs. This fact, added to the insane selling skills of the artist, resulted in 367,500 sales, an outstanding number for 2012's standards.

Digital Songs

As a reminder, the weighting is done with a 10 to 1.5 ratio between one album and one digital single.

21 managed to become one of the highest selling albums of all-time at the peak of download sales.

It is fairly impressive since it means the album faced competition from its own stand-alone tracks which were all available for sale.

As a trademark of Adele's stunning crossover appeal she did wonders in this format too.

Rolling In The Deep is quite simply one of the highest selling digital song ever with 20.64 million sales. This includes 8.9 million downloads in the US, 4.25 million in South Korea, and 1.11 million in the UK.

Someone Like You is nearly as strong at 17.16 million while Set the Fire to the Rain completes an incredible trio at more than 10 million units.

Both Rumour Has It and Turning Tables were sent to radios impulsing multi-million sales, while every album cut from 21 tops half a million sales. The total of digital sales for songs of this album total 59.1 million.

Skyfall and Hello, at 7.13 million and 11.28 million, respectively, were massive follow ups too. 

When We Were Young and Send My Love both topped 2 million. While lower, this is still incredible considering the collapse of downloads and the number of units sold by 25 in its first weeks.

Singles from 19 didn't sell much upon release, but they went on to become huge catalog sellers, especially Make You Feel My Love.

This cover of the Bob Dylan track has now become one of her very biggest tracks. Its UK sales have already topped 1 million while the US tally is already on 1.9 million and still climbing.

Now that downloads are gone in South Korea, and that sales are dreadful in traditional markets, Easy On Me hasn't quite sold the same as its predecessors. It's up to 530,000 units so far.

In total Adele is now just over 100 million downloads and ringtones.

Streaming

Streaming is made up of audio and video streams. Our CSPC methodology includes both to better reflect the real popularity of each track. The main source of data for each avenue is respectively Spotify and YouTube. To factor in the growing impact of multiple Asian countries where these platforms aren't always the go-to site for music streaming, more sources have been added.

In order to account for their real popularity in each relevant country, the below sources have been used along with the mentioned ratios that reflect the market share of each area.

Audio Streams
– South Korea: Genie streams * 2.20 (consistent with Gaon streaming numbers)
– Japan: AWA streams * 68 / 4 (AWA has 4% of the Japanese streaming market, and 32% are already considered through Spotify’s extrapolation)
– Arabic world: Anghami streams
– Sub-Saharan Africa: Boomplay + Audiomack streams
– Elsewhere: Spotify streams * 649 / 406 (649 million subscribers of global platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, YouTube Music, Deezer, etc. against 406 million from Spotify itself) + Genie streams * 2.20 (uses Genie rather than Spotify to extrapolate markets like Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam)

Video Streams
– China* : QQ video streams * 50 if the song is available for audio stream, QQ video streams * 5 elseway (scale built based on known figures for several major artists)
– Elsewhere : Youtube views increased by 10% to account for various local platforms

*since Chinese streaming platforms are mostly video streaming platforms, their streams are weighted on par with YouTube streams.

Audio Stream value – 1,500 plays equal 1 album unit
Video Stream value – 6,750 views equal 1 album unit

Equivalent Albums Sales (EAS) = ( Spotify * 649/406 + Genie * 2.20 * 2 + AWA * 68 / 4 + Anghami + Boomplay + Audiomack ) / 1500 + ( QQ views* 50(or 5) + YouTube * 1.1 ) / 6750

Top Hits

Streaming results for Adele may not look as impressive as her albums and singles sales. The reason is quite obvious, as each 21, Skyfall and 25 had their streaming availability delayed to make room for sales while the hype was still high.

In fact, 21 was introduced into Spotify in late June 2012, nearly one year and a half after its release.

Still, the enduring appeal of this record accumulated over 6.8 million equivalent album sales thanks to songs like Rolling In The Deep (1.14 billion on Spotify and 2.88 billion on YouTube) and Someone Like You (1.3 billion and 3.85 billion, respectively) remaining everyone's favorites.

19 registers not one, but two songs inside Adele's personal Top 11. Songs like Make You Feel My Love (818 million on Spotify and 665 million on YouTube) and Chasing Pavements (413 million on Spotify and 355 million on YouTube) have impressive showings despite not setting the charts on fire, which proves how much of a catalog smash this record has been.

About 25's songs, the three singles were added onto streaming platforms when they were released as singles, while album tracks were introduced in June 2016, more than 7 months after the record came out in November 2015.

Obviously, Hello's score is absolutely massive, representing 2.1 million equivalent album sales from streaming alone.

The track, nearing 1.3 billion streams on Spotify and over 3.3 billion on YouTube, used to be her biggest streaming smash, although Someone Like You came back from behind to claim the top spot.

21 has also now moved ahead of 25 in terms of cumulative streaming sales. They stand on 6.85 million and 6.42 million, respectively, unbelievable numbers for albums pre-dating the explosion of streaming and that arrived late to the party.

As for 30, the record breaking debut of Easy On Me is getting confirmed in the long run, as the song is going to pass 1 billion streams on Spotify soon, and most likely on YouTube as well although in a more distant future.

The main issue for the album is the lack of strength from remaining songs. So far, none has been able to gain traction. The second single Oh My God is still below 300 million on Spotify and already out of charts in most countries. Nothing else is taking over for now, which can end the 30 era pretty soon.

Full catalog breakdown

If you are familiar with the artist's catalog and want to check details of each and every song, you can access to all of them right here.

Keep yourself up to date

Our website provides you a fantastic tool which fetchs updated Spotify streams as you request them, use it to watch these results grow day after day!

Adele compilations sales

It sounds fairly logical to add together weighted sales of one era - studio album, physical singles, downloads, streams - to get the full picture of an album's popularity. For older releases though, they also generate sales of various live, music videos and compilation albums.

All those packaging-only records do not create value, they exploit the value originating from the parent studio album of each of its tracks instead. Inevitably, when such compilations are issued, this downgrades catalog sales of the original LP. Thus, to perfectly gauge the worth of these releases, we need to re-assign sales proportionally to its contribution of all the compilations which feature its songs. The following table explains this method.

The distribution process

How to understand this table? In the example of Live At the Royal Albert Hall, these figures mean it sold 3,485,000 units worldwide. The second statistics column means all versions of all the songs included on this package add for 8,714,056 equivalent album sales from streams of all types.

The second part on the right of the table shows how many equivalent streams are coming from each original album, plus the share it represents on the overall package.

Thus, streaming figures tell us songs from the 21 album are responsible for 77% of the Live At the Royal Albert Hall track list attractiveness. This means it generated 2,697,000 of its 3,485,000 album sales and so forth for the other records. We then apply this process to all compilations present on the table.

Full Length related records Sales – Summary

Here is the most underestimated indicator of an album’s success – the amount of compilation sales of all kinds it generated. Due to the dependency of sales of the original studio albums on these releases, they are a key piece of the jigsaw.

Total Album (all types) Sales per Country

Please note country-specific numbers may miss sales of a few minor releases, although totals are complete.

Adele Career CSPC Results

So, after checking all the figures, how many overall equivalent album sales has each album by Adele achieved? Well, at this point we hardly need to add up all of the figures defined in this article!

Albums CSPC results

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In spite of being released as recently as in 2011, 21 is already up to 48.98 million albums sales equivalent.

This is more than anything Madonna and Mariah Carey ever released.

A pair of years ago we reported it was close to Shania Twain's Come On Over and Celine Dion's Let's Talk About Love. As you can guess, it is now ahead.

In other words, 21 has now become the second most successful female album ever, with only The Bodyguard by Whitney Houston remaining untouchable as of now. With a 6-million gap, it doesn't even feel impossible anymore to see 21 claiming the lead at some point.

Considering the outstanding machine 21 has been, we tend to forget the rest of her discography. Putting the Orphan Album folder apart, almost exclusively made up of Skyfall, her first three albums add for a history-making 31.2 million average.

25, the 2015 juggernaut, continues to grow at fast pace. It already climbed to 30.25 million equivalent album sales, destroying career peaks of the likes of Rihanna or Taylor Swift.

It is also ahead of historical albums including Like A Prayer and Ray of Light by Madonna, Oops!…I Did It Again by Britney Spears and Back to Black by Amy Winehouse.

On its side, 30 is unlikely to reach the historical performances of its predecessors. At over 6 million, it's still a great seller for its day and age, currently sitting at #3 among the 2021 top sellers.

The cumulative tally of Adele is up to 101.4 million equivalent album sales, an unbelievable figure for an artist with only 4 albums, who exploded only with her second release, and with nearly no featuring.

Simply outstanding results.

Singles CSPC results

The list is compiled in album equivalent sales generated by each song. Therefore, these figures are not merged units of singles formats. Instead, it includes weighted sales of the song's physical single, download, ringtone and streaming as well as its share among sales of all albums on which it is featured.

1. 2011 - Adele - Someone Like You [21] - 15,360,000
2. 2010 - Adele - Rolling In The Deep [21] - 13,810,000
3. 2015 - Adele - Hello [25] - 10,650,000
4. 2011 - Adele - Set Fire To The Rain [21] - 8,290,000
5. 2008 - Adele - Make You Feel My Love [19] - 5,690,000
6. 2015 - Adele - When We Were Young [25] - 5,550,000
7. 2015 - Adele - Send My Love (To Your New Lover) [25] - 4,800,000
8. 2021 - Adele - Easy on Me [30] - 3,090,000
9. 2008 - Adele - Chasing Pavements [19] - 3,060,000
10. 2011 - Adele - Turning Tables [21] - 2,580,000
11. 2015 - Adele - Water Under The Bridge [25] - 2,490,000
12. 2015 - Adele - All I Ask [25] - 2,350,000
13. 2011 - Adele - Rumour Has It [21] - 2,210,000

If you feel inspired by this list, we just created this CSPC Adele playlist on Spotify!

Discography results

Thanks to our new ASR (Artist Success Rating) concept, we know that her sales represent 45.07million times the purchase of her entire discography. Coupled with their total sales, it translates into an ASR score of 383.

It is similar to the score of artists like Metallica and The Doors. The ranking of all artists studied so far is available too at this link.

Records & Achievements

• At 30,380,000 pure album sales, 21 is the highest selling studio album of the last 23 years.
• 21 sold over 1 million units in Canada, Australia, the UK, France and Germany. The last album to do so is Dire Straits‘ Brothers In Arms from 1986.
• At 20,640,000 digital sales, Rolling In The Deep is among the Top 5 best selling digital single of all-time.
• Hello is the last non-Chinese 10-million selling song released as a download.
• 25 is the fastest selling album of time in the US (3.38 million in one week) and the UK (800,000) among other countries, as well as Worldwide.
• At 14,290,000 EAS, 19 is the fifth most successful album from 2008.
• At 48,983,000 EAS, 21 is the second most successful female album of all-time.
• At 48,983,000 EAS, 21 is the most successful album of the millennium.
• At 30,245,000 EAS, 25 is the second most successful album of the 10s.
• At 30,245,000 EAS, 25 is the fifth most successful album of the millennium.
• At 6,058,000 EAS, 30 is the third most successful album from 2021.
• At 15,360,000 EAS, Someone Like You is the most successful song from 2011, and from the 2010s.
• At 13,810,000 EAS, Rolling In The Deep is the most successful song from 2010, and second from the 2010s.
• At 10,650,000 EAS, Hello is the most successful song from 2015, and third from the 2010s.

NB: EAS means Equivalent Album Sales.

Dynamic Spotify Key Performance Indicators

Please note that numbers below are retrieved automatically, so they will evolve day by day unlike previously listed data which is valid as of the publication date of the article.

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As usual, feel free to comment and / or ask a question!

Sources: IFPI, Spotify, YouTube, Discogs.

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