After one day on sale, Adele’s 25 appears set to break *NSYNC’s long-standing one-week Nielsen-era U.S. album sales record of 2.42 million sold, according to industry forecasters. Sources say the set is on track to sell at least 2.5 million in pure album sales in its first week, and sold more than 900,000 copies alone through the iTunes Store on its first day of release.
*NSYNC currently owns the single largest sales week for an album since Nielsen Music began tracking point-of-sale music purchases in 1991. (Prior to 1991, there was no authoritative music sales tracking service in the U.S. and thus, it was mostly unknown how many copies of an album or song/single were sold in a single week.)
*NSYNC’s No Strings Attached debuted with 2,416,000 sold in the week ending March 26, 2000. No Strings Attached has since remained the only album to sell 2 million copies in the U.S. in a single week.