Adele’s ‘21’ overtakes Oasis album on biggest-selling list

Data from the Official Charts Company shows that the singer needs half a million more sales of her second record to go above Abba, who are third. The album ‘21’, which includes hits like ‘Rolling In The Deep’ and ‘Rumour Has It’, has now sold 4,562,000 copies. It passed Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller and Pink Floyd’s […]

Data from the Official Charts Company shows that the singer needs half a million more sales of her second record to go above Abba, who are third.

The album ‘21’, which includes hits like ‘Rolling In The Deep’ and ‘Rumour Has It’, has now sold 4,562,000 copies.

It passed Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller and Pink Floyd’s ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ earlier this year.

Last Christmas’ ‘21’ overtook Amy Winehouse’s ‘Back To Black’ to become the UK’s biggest-selling album of the 21st Century so far.

The album, which was released in January 2011, has spent 101 weeks in the Official Albums Chart top 75 including 95 weeks in the top 40, 76 weeks in the top 10 and 23 weeks at number one.

It has sold 784,000 so far this year, making it the second biggest-selling album of 2012 so far behind Emeli Sande’s ‘Our Version Of Events’.

Adele, 24, won six Grammy Awards and two Brits following the release of 21.

The singer, whose real name is Adele Laurie Blue Adkins, also had her first child in October. She won the Brit Awards “Critics’ Choice” award and won the BBC Sound of 2008. At the 2009 Grammy Awards, Adele received the awards for Best New Artist and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance.

Adele released her second album, ‘21’, in early 2011, which surpassed the success of her debut, earning the singer six Grammy Awards in 2012 including Album of the Year, equalling the record for most Grammy Awards won by a female artist in one night.

The success of ‘21’ earned Adele numerous mentions in the Guinness World Records. She is the first artist to sell more than 3 million copies of an album in a year in the UK. With her two albums and the first two singles from ‘21’, ‘Rolling in the Deep’ and ‘Someone Like You’, she became the first living artist to achieve the feat of having two top-five hits in both the UK Official Singles Chart and the Official Albums Chart simultaneously since the Beatles in 1964. With her third release from the album, ‘Set Fire to the Rain’, which became her third number one single in the US, Adele became the first artist in history to lead the Billboard 200 concurrently with three Billboard Hot 100 number-ones.

Adele is the first female in the history of the Billboard Hot 100 to have three singles in the top 10 at the same time as a lead artist, and the first female artist to have two albums in the top five of the Billboard 200 and two singles in the top five of the Billboard Hot 100 simultaneously. ‘21’ is the longest running number one album by a female solo artist on the UK and US Albums Chart

Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ is still the best-selling album ever across the world.

It is estimated to have sold more than 70 million copies.