Text | Scribble music
On October 14, Adele's new debut single "Easy On Me" was released, and the highly anticipated new album "30" will also be released on November 19.
After six years, Adele finally returned.
Since the release of Adele's last album in 2015, the music industry has changed dramatically. How have streaming, vinyl records and music outreach evolved during the years she faded from the public eye?
As a folk singer, Adele has always maintained her own rhythm in an era dominated by passive beats. She has released only three albums in the last 14 years, and many of her peers have released new albums almost every year.
According to MRC Data, her second album, 21, released in 2011, sold 16.1 million copies, making it the best-selling album in a decade. Her latest album, 25, was the best-selling album of 2015, with its first week selling a record high in the SoundScan era (3.38 million copies) and eventually reaching 12 million copies.
Adele returns with her debut album in six years, 30, and her lead single, Easy On Me, is available today. In interviews with Vogue and the British version of Vogue, Adele said: "I think this album is self-destructive, then self-reflection, and then somehow self-redemption. ”
She's changed a lot over the past six years: moving from London to Beverly Hills, divorcing her husband, losing weight and getting a new look, and debuting Saturday Night Live in 2020, becoming a comedian.
So far, the "Easy On Me" we have heard still sounds no different from the Adele that made the world fall in love more than a decade ago. But even though Adele's voice still doesn't sound the same, the fast-growing music industry is different. The 2021 album is also more difficult to define by the old yardsticks.
<h2>The traditional music sales model is no longer working</h2>
Back in the mid-2010s, streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music had already begun to reshape music consumption, further driving down physical album sales.
But A-list artists like Adele and Taylor Swift are still focused on releasing albums, whether in physical formats like CD and vinyl, or digital formats on iTunes, so much so that their new albums initially didn't support streaming formats.
For a while, "no streaming window" looked like it might become the industry standard, just as movies don't get online on-demand service until months after they're released in theaters.
Adele's "25" didn't go live on streaming until June 2016 (with the exception of the hit single "Hello"), more than seven months after the album hit the shelves. Beginning in 2014, Taylor Swift shut down his music streaming service for three years, until three weeks after the release of Reputation in 2017.
In recent years, however, traditional sales channels have largely disappeared, and most mainstream albums can be purchased on a variety of platforms or released online simultaneously. Even superstars like Adele or Swift, if they continue the "paywall" model, will have their sales and cultural impact greatly reduced in their first week.
If there's anyone who has the strength to try it, it's Adele. In 2015, she sold 9.5 million copies of 25, accounting for more than three-quarters of the album's total sales, but now, it is unlikely that she will go against the wind on "30".
<h2>Lyrical slow songs face more resistance</h2>
In the '80s and '90s, folk songs from singers like Whitney Houston and Boyz II Men often dominated the Top 100 Songs chart, but to date, folk dominance on the charts has been waning.
When "Someone Like You" became Adele's second 100 hits in 2011, she bucked the trend and produced a succinct and dignified piano ballad that was no less powerful than Lady Gaga or Katie Perry dancing on the dance floor.
Notably, it was the first Hot 100 chart to feature only piano and vocals, and the first chart to be the first in four years after Plain White T's 2007 debut soundtrack album Hey There Delilah.
After 21, there were some more understated chart-topping songs, such as Bruno Mars's "When I Was Your Man" and Gottje and Kimbra's "Somebody That I Used to Know," but pop dance and hip-hop remained the bounty on the pop charts.
Although Justin Bieber's "Love Yourself" topped the Top 100 a few weeks after Adele's last number one single, "Hello," in recent years, the unpopularity of tender and soothing songs has been evident to everyone.
This year, Olivia Rodrigo's first blockbuster solo single, Drivers License, which combines traditional folk and modern electronics in a novel way, along with Someone Like You and Maria Carey's We Belong Together, is one of the few truly iconic ballads of the 21st century.
In the streaming era, mainstream stars often climb to the top of the singles charts with their singing voices and arrangements with different rhythms, but platforms seem to be less willing to accept softer songs as number one singles, and these songs tend to have a shorter shelf life on streaming.
In 2020, Taylor Swift released two albums, both of which featured a single that topped the Hot 100 charts: "Cardigan" from the album Folklore and "Willow" from Evermore.
But these stream-driven chart victories were short-lived, with neither song making a hit on pop radio: both were at No. 17 on the Billboard pop song chart, while Swift's previous singles topped the chart nine times.
Sister A and Justin Bieber's waltz "Stuck With U" also only ranked 14th on the pop song charts. In the Bulletproof Junior's 6 Hot 100 charts, the slowest-paced "Life Goes On" has never even made it onto the Billboard radio song charts.
On October 5, Adele tweeted a short video clip of "Easy on Me" with piano chords of about 13 seconds. "Vogue" author Giles Hartsley described the song as having a "slow and contemplative arrangement" after Adele rehearsed the song for him.
Maybe "Easy On Me" will be popular on major radio stations in a few months, but it is also possible that it will temporarily make the hot list and not become popular on radio. After all, the slowest single since the age of 25, "When We Were Young," underperformed and failed to make it into the top 10.
<h2>Breaking millions of sales in the first week became a myth</h2>
Before streaming, it wasn't easy for an album to sell 1 million copies in its first week, which meant an artist was on the cusp of the pop scene.
Recently, however, this has become more rare.
Taylor Swift's Reputation was the last album to sell platinum in a single week, selling about 1.24 million in its first week of release. In the past four years, only two albums have sold very closely, also by Swift: Lover (867,000) in 2019 and Folklore (846,000 in 2020).
For rappers, whose fans prefer streaming, sometimes even abandon physical distribution altogether, breaking the million in the first week is almost entirely impossible. In September, Drake's Certified Lover Boy broke Apple and Spotify's first-week streaming record, but it sold about 613,000 albums in its first week, the lowest first-week sales since Drake's debut album Thank Me Later in 2011.
Adele's last album, 25, was a well-deserved ceiling: it was the only album that sold 3 million copies in its first week, and the only album to sell more than 1 million copies twice in a week. Given current industry trends, it seems impossible to surpass this achievement if albums are still not released on streaming.
<h2>Sales of vinyl records have surpassed CDs</h2>
One of the biggest changes in record sales in recent years has been the return of vinyl records. In 2016, more than 13 million vinyl records were sold in the United States, and by 2020, that number has more than doubled to 27 million, and vinyl records are expected to surpass CD records in 2021, the first time in more than 30 years.
For Adele's best-selling albums, CD sales remained impressively consistent: CDs accounted for about 51 percent of both "21" and "25" album sales. Vinyl record sales rose slightly, accounting for about 1.5% of the total sales of 21 records and more than 2% of the total sales of 25 records.
The surge in modern vinyl record sales came largely from Fleetwood Mack's 1977 classic Rumours, but young artists with old-fashioned pop vocals like Harry Stiles also made a fortune on vinyl records. The one-way singer's second solo album, Fine Line, was the highest-selling album on vinyl records in the United States in 2020, reaching 232,000 copies.
When Taylor Swift's Evermore vinyl record finally hit the market in May, the album sold 102,000 vinyl records in a single week, the highest-selling week since MRC Data began recording vinyl records in 1991, accounting for more than a tenth of Evermore's total sales.
By 2021, Adele's record sales could still outpace others. But if Columbia makes a lot of vinyl records for her new album, she could still break some of the record industry records.
<h2>Album warm-up cycles are getting shorter and shorter</h2>
While Beyoncé-style surprise releases are no longer as popular as they used to be, the pre-release time for mainstream albums has been shortened in recent years.
The two-month warm-up period from "Rolling in The Deep" to the release of "21", and even the one-month period from "Hello" to the official launch of "25", seems luxurious today. Because Taylor Swift, Drake, and Kanye West's latest albums don't have previously released singles, Ariana Grande's last album was only released a week in advance.
While some artists may release another single or two while preparing an album, Adele never needs to, and between now and the release of 30, we'll probably only hear the song "Easy On Me."
With the acceleration of cultural changes now, even big singers can hardly keep an album hot for too long.
For now, several hit albums still have a long way to go – Dua Ripa's "Future Nostalgia" and The Weeknd's "After Hours" have both been released for more than a year in a row. But an album that doesn't come up with new content, whether it's a remix version of a celebrity collection or a deluxe version with more songs, can't stay on the charts that long.
The rise of TikTok extended the life of some albums in a way that artists and record labels had not anticipated: More than a year after Doja Cat released the album, TikTok's "#剪影挑战" made her Streets in the top 20.
With the slow pace at which Adele was releasing, it's hard to imagine Adele releasing a deluxe version of a few new songs a few months after the album's release. So, if the album is to have a long shelf life, it's likely to go the traditional way: music videos, TV performances, touring, and, the fans' genuine love for the song.