Almost five years after the release of her last album, Adele has released her new album 25 today, led by her smash hit single “Hello.” Though she doesn’t exactly fit the mold of other pop divas at the top of the charts, she is taking a page out of their book by electing not to make the album available on streaming services.
In today’s pop music landscape, it has become standard to release an album or EP every couple years, but Adele chose to go on hiatus before releasing her third age based title. With the exception of performing the title track off of the Skyfall soundtrack, the soulful songstress took some time off to enjoy life following the massive success of her 2011’s Grammy Award winning 21.
It was announced in August that Adele would be releasing her third album and she released its first single “Hello” on October 22, which broke the Vevo record for most views in a day on YouTube with 27.7 million in its first 24 hours.”Hello” currently sits at over 426 million views on YouTube and over 159 million listens on Spotify.
Despite her lead single’s success on streaming services, Adele has chosen not to release 25 to streaming services, not immediately at least. While the British singer and songwriter didn’t go full on Taylor Swift and pull her entire discography, fans using top services like Spotify, Apple Music and the ever struggling Tidal won’t be able to stream the album.
This has been a popular trend among artists and bands for a couple of different reasons. One being that album sales have been lacking in recent years, with only Drake’s If You’re Reading This, It’s Too Late and Taylor Swift 1989 going platinum in 2015, and one way to maximize them is by making the only way to legally listen to the album is to buy it. The other reason for this trend is that the music industry as a whole has taken issue with the profitability of streaming sites, which has become a very major issue as of lat.
All in all, Adele’s 25 is already poised to be one of the top albums of this year with or without streaming. If critical reviews are any indication, she could even be looking at another armful of Grammys in the very near future.
Last Updated on November 27, 2018.
