charts discussion HDD: Adele 833k (biggest debut of the year), Taylor 165k

[RobynYoBank]

1 hour ago, Cruel Summer said:

I seriously, honestly do not understand why we would sit here and pretend that the change to the bundle rule had such a wildly outsized impact on the music industry that 30 is completely incomparable to the last album to do roughly the same numbers. It feels entirely like an excuse rather than a reasoned position - a way to continue the narrative that Adele is some untouchable commercial goddess with no peers. We don't even know how many bundles Folklore actually sold, correct? And even if we did, we have zero way of proving that Taylor would have otherwise debuted lower. 

Because they have nothing else to cling to, I fear. 

Edited November 25, 2021 by RobynYoBank

[family.guy123]

how long has the no bundle rule been in place? say it's been 11 months, somebody compare the average debut weeks 11 months prior and 11 months since.

[georgechxng]

54 minutes ago, Cleanromantic said:

These numbers are disappointing for her and her label, let's not lie to ourselves. There's a reason they held off releasing it during the pandemic, and that is to maximize sales. This is not the first time Adele and her label follow a strategy to sell, by her own admission, 25 was about motherhood before she scrapped it and wrote an album that followed the 21 formula because "no body would buy that". And 30 is promoted as an authentic album compared to 25. Her team definitely expected a 1.5 million debut at the very least, but the album is mediocre and lacks the melodies and lyricism that made 21 and 25 such gargantuan successes. Her taking so much time between projects has also hindered her streaming potential, but I guess one silver lining of this underperformance is that her label would be expecting her to take shorter hiatuses between albums in order for her to sell, so at the very least her fans won in that regard.

Oh sweetie, I can guarantee you that no label or artist would be disappointed in having the best selling album of the year after 3 days of release, especially when they're making millions out of them, EOM and the CBS and ITV specials for the album (they have earned over 100M alone with those because Adele's WW demand has allowed them to sell those concerts in over 20 countries). If anything, they must be celebrating, LOL. No matter how hard you and other swifties try to twist it, it won't change the fact that this is the biggest debut of the year by over 200k units and an absolutely success

Edited November 25, 2021 by georgechxng

[Pink Ranger]

This ongoing feud between Adele & Taylor fans  

 

both your faves are the best selling women in music currently why y’all bickering  

[Vespertine]

2 hours ago, Cruel Summer said:

I seriously, honestly do not understand why we would sit here and pretend that the change to the bundle rule had such a wildly outsized impact on the music industry that 30 is completely incomparable to the last album to do roughly the same numbers. It feels entirely like an excuse rather than a reasoned position - a way to continue the narrative that Adele is some untouchable commercial goddess with no peers. We don't even know how many bundles Folklore actually sold, correct? And even if we did, we have zero way of proving that Taylor would have otherwise debuted lower. 

Right

 

They also completely ignore the fact that Folklore was not available in physical stores when it dropped, which is where Taylor typically racks up tons of pure sales.

 

But BuNdLeS 

[Sergi91]

1 hour ago, Cleanromantic said:

These numbers are disappointing for her and her label, let's not lie to ourselves. There's a reason they held off releasing it during the pandemic, and that is to maximize sales. This is not the first time Adele and her label follow a strategy to sell, by her own admission, 25 was about motherhood before she scrapped it and wrote an album that followed the 21 formula because "no body would buy that". And 30 is promoted as an authentic album compared to 25. Her team definitely expected a 1.5 million debut at the very least, but the album is mediocre and lacks the melodies and lyricism that made 21 and 25 such gargantuan successes. Her taking so much time between projects has also hindered her streaming potential, but I guess one silver lining of this underperformance is that her label would be expecting her to take shorter hiatuses between albums in order for her to sell, so at the very least her fans won in that regard.

I couldn’t have said it better myself 

[RobynYoBank]

14 minutes ago, Vespertine said:

Right

 

They also completely ignore the fact that Folklore was not available in physical stores when it dropped, which is where Taylor typically racks up tons of pure sales.

 

But BuNdLeS 

Same with Red, I went to four Targets and not a single copy to be found 

[fridayteenage]

13 minutes ago, RobynYoBank said:

Same with Red, I went to four Targets and not a single copy to be found 

I had to resort to digging through Walmart's messy CD pile.

 

But anyway, both Adele and Taylor were and are successful artists. See: the top 2.

[georgechxng]

Swifties clinging on their insecurity just like Folklore's 800k clinged onto its bundles

[WestHaven]

How did I miss this 

[iamanearthling]

Lols. Eggs on adelephants faces.

Edited November 25, 2021 by iamanearthling
Spelling

[Elusive Chanteuse]

1 minute ago, iamanearthling said:

Lols. Eggs one adeleohants faces.

Not really her actual fans are pretty happy

[georgechxng]

Swifties saying bundles didn't play a factor on Folklore's numbers when Taylor had over 60 of them is hillarious to me. Like it's okay - she did what she had to do to have a over 700k debut. I don't know why y'all are acting like this is something to be embarassed off. I thought Taylor was a respected business woman, y'all should celebrate this, not hide from people 

 

[abrahamjmr]

3 hours ago, Cruel Summer said:

I seriously, honestly do not understand why we would sit here and pretend that the change to the bundle rule had such a wildly outsized impact on the music industry that 30 is completely incomparable to the last album to do roughly the same numbers. It feels entirely like an excuse rather than a reasoned position - a way to continue the narrative that Adele is some untouchable commercial goddess with no peers. We don't even know how many bundles Folklore actually sold, correct? And even if we did, we have zero way of proving that Taylor would have otherwise debuted lower. 

When it comes to selling albums, she kinda is. 21 one is the biggest album of the century for a reason, and the heights she got to with 25 are still and will always remain untouched. The fact that she managed to sell over 70 million albums with three efforts says it all - and they're still selling: 

 

Top 200 iTunes US:

1. 30

21. 21

22. 25

36. 19

 

Amazon US:

1. 30

24. 21

33. 19

41. 25

 

Imagine selling 10 million albums pure of two out of her four albums yet there are still people interested enough to buy them in the US alone. Rolling in the Deep is the best selling single by a female artist in the digital era, yet it's about to reach 1B streams on Spotify and it will get to 2B on YouTube. I don't really get this need to downplay Adele to the same level as other artists, when in reality, she excels in several departments - the same way Taylor does. They the biggest artists of the century and in the same vein Swift peaked, Adele would eventually do the same thing. 

[Cruel Summer]

22 minutes ago, abrahamjmr said:

I don't really get this need to downplay Adele to the same level as other artists, when in reality, she excels in several departments - the same way Taylor does. They the biggest artists of the century and in the same vein Swift peaked, Adele would eventually do the same thing. 

While her achievements and sales are clearly noteworthy, I don't personally feel that it is downplaying her to deny the pervasive narrative of her untouchability and to use the most commercially comparable artist to illustrate that denial. It's not about putting her on the level of "other artists" broadly - it's about recognizing that she is on roughly the same level as a very small select few other artists. It is clearer than ever from the sales being predicted in this very thread that she is no longer unable to be accurately quantified or predicted the way many had casually assumed. That's all.

[Starchild]

37 minutes ago, georgechxng said:

Swifties saying bundles didn't play a factor on Folklore's numbers when Taylor had over 60 of them is hillarious to me. Like it's okay - she did what she had to do to have a over 700k debut. I don't know why y'all are acting like this is something to be embarassed off. I thought Taylor was a respected business woman, y'all should celebrate this, not hide from people 

 

All this energy when nobody cares  people see the number and that’s it, but I guess since y’all live in stan world 24/7 it makes sense 

[abrahamjmr]

1 minute ago, Cruel Summer said:

While her achievements and sales are clearly noteworthy, I don't personally feel that it is downplaying her to deny the pervasive narrative of her untouchability and to use the most commercially comparable artist to illustrate that denial. It's not about putting her on the level of "other artists" broadly - it's about recognizing that she is on roughly the same level as a very small select few other artists. It is clearer than ever from the sales being predicted in this very thread that she is no longer unable to be accurately quantified or predicted the way many had casually assumed. That's all.

And every artist go through the same phase, it simply happens. Adele wasn't always going to open with 3M sales first week in the fact that she's getting close says a lot. If she ends up doing over 900k or 1M - which won't probably happen, what will y'all have to say? You were right though, about what you say about her being in the same level as a very small select few other artist. A group of two: Taylor and her.

[Carrie-is-no-1]

- Adele has a sale decline because the physical market - her biggest selling market - has collapsed since 2015. Who still has a ****ing CD player. The increase in vinyl demand won't make up for it. At the same time, she is still the #1 seller in this space - that we cannot deny. 

- 25 has a huge bulk of digital sales too - that has collapsed COMPLETELY.

- The album is not streaming friendly because of the nature of the tracks. As a fan myself, i find it hard repeating some of the best tracks because of the heavy nature of the content. That said, the streaming-friendly tracks like OMG, CIGI and IDW will get some legs for 30, and the album is doing GREAT on streaming. If Adele wants to compete in a stream-driven market, she has to follow some of the tactics: more tracks, shorter tracks. If she doesn't for whatever artistic vision that she has, it's fine - she has nothing to prove anyway (I mean, she could've put WWW on streaming if she wants it - but that song just doesn't fit the narrative of the album). Watch the girl sweeping 2023's Grammys. 

 

As for Tay, she is the #1 artists for Streaming for a lot of reasons, and she's owning that space. The true Adele fans know this and that's fine.

 

At the end of the day, imagine having one female artist owning the streaming space and another one owning the pure sale space. We should celebrate that instead. 

 

Can the mod close this thread./.

Edited November 25, 2021 by Carrie-is-no-1

[Sazare]

2 hours ago, RobynYoBank said:

Same with Red, I went to four Targets and not a single copy to be found 

I’m afraid those may have just gotten shipped back

[Cruel Summer]

1 minute ago, abrahamjmr said:

And every artist go through the same phase, it simply happens. Adele wasn't always going to open with 3M sales first week in the fact that she's getting close says a lot. If she ends up doing over 900k or 1M - which won't probably happen, what will y'all have to say? You were right though, about what you say about her being in the same level as a very small select few other artist. A group of two: Taylor and her.

To be fair, while I've posted a lot in this thread, I have very specifically avoided saying just about anything negative about Adele, because honestly, there's nothing negative to say, for me. I'm interested first in what the numbers mean; my secondary interest, and a biased one that I can recognize, is observing what this means specifically in relation to my favorite artist's position in the industry. When it comes to the direct comparison, all I care about is the fact that we're no longer in a world where the facts, in my interpretation, can support Taylor being decisively second. It's a rule of two situation right now, with different lenses offering slightly different views of the situation. But as for Adele specifically, you won't find me really celebrating her numbers having dropped, and I won't be sad if she suddenly leaps up and snatches that 900k or 1m mark. I think she's a phenomenal talent who deserves every ounce of success, and if the facts in the end show that 30 is decisively the biggest thing since 25, I'll face them and appropriately evolve my stance on who's the biggest and why. In the end, I just like the numbers side of things by nature and happen to deeply love Taylor and her work, and those things occasionally intertwine - and once in a while I may get just a little pointed in my defense of Taylor and my fellow Swifties.

 

I do recognize that this happens to everyone eventually. While there are a number of caveats and explanations for why it happened, Taylor fans got their own taste of that kind of thing with Evermore's release, and I was genuinely shocked to see her pull back from that with Red last week. I am grateful every day that Taylor has maintained such incredible consistency across her eleven album releases, letting her keep going at a rapid pace and giving more and more music to her fans - but I know the success part won't always look the same, and that's part of why I won't relish in another artist's naturally waning commercial performance (particularly not when it will likely roughly match Taylor's own high water mark for this decade so far).

[HeWon'tGo]

4 minutes ago, Carrie-is-no-1 said:

- Adele has a sale decline because the physical market - her biggest selling market - has collapsed since 2015. Who still has a ****ing CD player. The increase in vinyl demand won't make up for it. At the same time, she is still the #1 seller in this space - that we cannot deny. 

- 25 has a huge bulk of digital sales too - that has collapsed COMPLETELY.

- The album is not streaming friendly because of the nature of the tracks. As a fan myself, i find it hard repeating some of the best tracks because of the heavy nature of the content. That said, the streaming-friendly tracks like OMG, CIGI and IDW will get some legs for 30, and the album is doing GREAT on streaming. If Adele wants to compete in a stream-driven market, she has to follow some of the tactics: more tracks, shorter tracks. If she doesn't for whatever artistic vision that she has, it's fine - she has nothing to prove anyway. What the girl sweeping 2023's Grammys. 

 

As for Tay, she is the #1 artists for Streaming for a lot of reasons, and she's owning that space. The true Adele fans know this and that's fine.

 

At the end of the day, imagine having one female artist owning the streaming space and another one owning the pure sale space. We should celebrate that instead. 

 

Can the mod close this thread./.

Well said

 

I would also love to add that ABSOLUTELY NOBODY outside of the stan world care about these numbers. Absolutely no one talks about how the album is performing on streaming or how it compares to previous release, etc. See the replies to the tweet below:

 

 

 

 

[blackbeatxx]

Oh so this thread went off the rails again 

[MardinBeksloy]

OTHs clinging to BUNDLES cuz it's all they have left since Adele can't be used anymore  The embarrassment 

[MardinBeksloy]

4 hours ago, Cleanromantic said:

These numbers are disappointing for her and her label, let's not lie to ourselves. There's a reason they held off releasing it during the pandemic, and that is to maximize sales. This is not the first time Adele and her label follow a strategy to sell, by her own admission, 25 was about motherhood before she scrapped it and wrote an album that followed the 21 formula because "no body would buy that". And 30 is promoted as an authentic album compared to 25. Her team definitely expected a 1.5 million debut at the very least, but the album is mediocre and lacks the melodies and lyricism that made 21 and 25 such gargantuan successes. Her taking so much time between projects has also hindered her streaming potential, but I guess one silver lining of this underperformance is that her label would be expecting her to take shorter hiatuses between albums in order for her to sell, so at the very least her fans won in that regard.

DRAG IT!

[Guest]

There are plenty of reasons why, mainly the collapse of physical sales and the fact that the album is not streaming friendly at all. That said, it’s for sure very underwhelming and anyone saying otherwise is on crack.