Hello from the top of the world! It’s Adele, breaking all the records, selling all the albums, and crushing every artist’s sales in her path. The first-week sales are in for 25, the collection Adele released on Nov. 20, and they’re staggering. The album sold a record-setting 3.38 million copies in the U.S. in its first week, Billboard reports, marking the largest sale week for an album since Nielsen SoundScan began tracking sales in 1991 and making 25 the first album to sell more than 3 million in a single week.
As of Tuesday, Adele had already sold 2.433 million albums and broke the single-week sales record, which was previously held by *NSYNC’s No Strings Attached, released in 2000. (They graciously ceded her the honor.) That number rose to 3 million as of Thursday.