Adele said Hello, and America listened – en masse.
As expected, Adele’s first single in three years, Hello, debuted the Billboard Hot 100 at No 1. Over the course of a single week, the song has been downloaded 1.1m times, according to Billboard. Adele has convincingly smashed the record set by Flo Rida, who sold 600,000 downloads of Right Round in a week in February 2009. Hello is only the 24th song to debut at No 1 in Hot 100’s history – and Adele’s first.
Adele is the first woman to go straight in at No 1 since Taylor Swift managed it with Shake It Off in September 2013. She dethrones The Hills by the Weeknd, which had spent six weeks at No 1.
This marks Adele’s fourth US No 1 song, following Rolling in the Deep (the year-end No 1 of 2011), Someone Like You and Set Fire to the Rain.
The video for Adele’s Hello, directed by French Canadian film-maker Xavier Dolan (Mommy), has also been a record-breaker. After first hitting the internet just over a week ago, it’s been viewed close to 200m times on Vevo.
The video broke Swift’s records for the most views on Vevo in 24 hours, by accumulating 27.7m views in its first day online, beating the 20.1m views that Bad Blood and its star-studded cast of celebrities attracted.
Predictions for Adele’s new album 25 (on which Hello is featured) are fittingly astronomical: industry forecasters are betting that she could sell as many as 2m albums during its first week of release. No album since N Sync’s 2000 album No Strings Attached – which sold 2.4m copies in the US in its first week – has managed the feat.
The album debuts in stores and online 20 November.
