Adele's Live At The Royal Albert Hall sold 146,000 copies this week, which is its biggest tally to date. The DVD has sold 421K copies in its first four weeks. (That's the biggest total in a calendar year since a pair of Michael Jackson videos topped 400K in 2009. Number Ones sold 558K copies that year. Live In Bucharest sold 437K. )
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Adele's DVD Live At The Royal Albert Hall sold 96,000 copies this week, which is the greatest one-week sales tally for a music video in four years. After just one week, Live At The Royal Albert Hall is the best-selling music video of 2011. It is followed by AC/DC's Live At River Plate (73K), Beyonce's I Am…World Tour (63K) and a 25th anniversary concert presentation of Les Miserables (63K). Adele is now assured of having the year's #1 album (21), #1 song ("Rolling In The Deep") and #1 music video.
No other artist in Nielsen SoundScan history has ever topped all three of these year-end charts. *NSYNC and 50 Cent each had the year's #1 album and #1 music video, but fell short on the list of the year's best-selling singles. The boy band scored in 2000 with the album No Strings Attached and the music video Live At Madison Square Garden. 50 Cent triumphed in 2003 with the album Get Rich Or Die Tryin' and the music video The New Breed.
Adele's DVD sold more copies this week than any of Michael Jackson's videos did in any one week in the wake of his death in June 2009. Live In Bucharest: The Dangerous Tour sold 74,000 copies in one week in July 2009. Jackson's Number Ones video sold 69,000 copies the following week. (These figures may not sound like much, but bear in mind that music videos are pricier than CDs or digital albums.)
What was the last music video to sell as many as 96K copies in one week? That's a surprisingly tricky question. Until February 2008, DVDs that were packaged with CDs were allowed to appear on both Top Music Videos and The Billboard 200. (Now, they appear on one chart or the other, depending on which component is predominant.) Under the old rules, Garth Brooks' The Ultimate Collection was considered both an album and a music video. The retrospective topped 100K in weekly sales in each of its first seven weeks of release in November and December 2007.
Live At The Royal Albert Hall is the third video recorded at the legendary London venue to reach #1 on the Top Music Videos chart. It follows a 10th anniversary presentation of Les Miserables, which entered the chart at #1 in October 1996, and Cream's Royal Albert Hall: London May 2-3-5-6 2005, which debuted at #1 in October 2005.
With no Adele in the scene recently, imagine when she recovers and starts to promote. She can sit at home and still be the most successful pop act right now. I don't want to even imagine if she starts to promote. But really, hew else?