Williams is passionately unmeta, her lyrics transparent and direct. Panic at the Disco spent the first few songs on its debut album pre-emptively imagining what message-board-posting haters would say about the songs. Meanwhile, Taylor Swift, who no longer reigns over all those charts, can still brag that she’s got the longest #1 hit in history.In her lyrics, Williams is a throwback, too, out of step with her mostly male peers on the contemporary emo-punk circuit, who fill lyrics with wordy, hard-to-parse riddles shrieking, frantic confessions and hand-wringing meta-commentary. Still, some significant number of people who rarely buy or stream albums are still picking up the Adele record as soon as they can.

The 500,000 number doesn’t involve streaming, and 30 is doing big numbers there, as well. That would make the album a hit in any era. In three days, Adele beat both of those totals.īillboard reports that Adele shifted more than 500,000 copies of 30 in the first three days of release. Swift also had the biggest pre-Adele first-week sales of the year her Red (Taylor’s Version) moved 369,000 units the week before Adele released 30. Up until the past few days, the highest-selling album of 2021 was Taylor Swift’s evermore, which came out at the end of 2020 and sold 462,000 copies during this calendar year. Within three days, 30 had already become America’s biggest-selling album of 2021.Īdmittedly, when you’re talking about actual sales figures, you don’t have to do Thriller numbers to get the crown these days.

This past Friday, Adele released her long-awaited new LP 30. In an era when streaming has come to define the music business, people actually buy Adele’s albums. And then right away, she eclipses everyone else. The British singer can disappear for years at a time and then return with another album that sounds like virtually nothing else that’s happening in pop music.

Paramore album sales