Guardian News and Media/London

The album, 25, which shot to the iTunes number one in 106 out of 119 countries, sold 300,000 copies in the UK on its first day alone when it was released on Friday, one of the biggest first-day totals of all time.
Only two albums have ever sold more than 500,000 copies in a week - Progress by Take That, which sold 518,601 in its debut week in November 2010, and Oasis’s Be Here Now, the all-time record holder which notched 695,761 in its first chart week in August 1997.
The success of 25 follows in the wake of that of the first album single, Hello, which went platinum and has become the UK’s fastest selling song of the year.
In isolation, these figures are impressive, but against the backdrop of massively declining album sales over the past five years, such predictions are unprecedented for an album released in 2015. Thanks in part to the rise of streaming, UK sales of digital albums fell by 9% and physical albums fell by 7% in 2014. Only one debut album this year, James Bay, has gone platinum. Last week, three critically acclaimed album releases by Grimes, Jamie Woon and Floating Points sold a combined total of just 7,000 albums.
The figures one again secure Adele’s place among the 1% of artists who can reliably sell albums in big numbers - along with Ed Sheeran and Sam Smith - contrasted with the 99% lower down the charts whose sales are in freefall. While music industry experts argue that this “superstar artiste economy” has always existed to some extent, the changing trends in music platforms and consumption have widened the gap more than ever.
The top 1% of musical works now account for 77% of total artist revenues.
Yet the industry analyst Mark Mulligan said that the market was very different to four years ago when Adele released 21, and predicted it would be a struggle to overtake it in terms of long-term album sales, particularly physical CDs.
Mulligan said: “The important thing that Adele did with 21 was she managed to get lots of fading music buyers back out of the woodwork and buying albums.
But the odds of those people being dragged out of the woodwork again, four years later, are even less because they would have receded even further from music buying.”