"A once-in-a-lifetime album": Adele's 21 tops US best-seller chart for second year running

"A once-in-a-lifetime album": Adele's 21 tops US best-seller chart for second year running

4 Jan 2013 18:13

The last time an artist had back-to-back best-sellers was in 1983 and 1984 with Michael Jackson’s Thriller

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More accolades: Adele picked up six Grammys last year

Reuters

Adele has notched up the best-selling record in the US for the second year running â€" with the same album.

She shifted 4.4 million copies of her follow-up hit 21 in 2012 after selling 5.8 million the year before.

The last time an artist had back-to-back best-sellers was in 1983 and 1984 with Michael Jackson’s Thriller.

Back here the new mum, 24, has sold 4.6 million copies, making it the fourth biggest selling album ever.

Billboard magazine’s Keith Caulfield said: “It’s sort of a once-in-a-lifetime album.”

Four of the top six records released in the US last year came from British acts.

One Direction were third with 1.6 million sales of Up All Night. They also grabbed fifth spot for Take Me Home which sold 1.3 million.

Folk band Mumford & Sons’ Babel took sixth having racked up 1.4 million sales, figures from Nielsen SoundScan showed.

Second place for 2012 sales went to US singer Taylor Swift, the girlfriend of One Direction's Harry Styles.

The top-selling single of the year was Gotye's Somebody That I Used To Know, which was downloaded a record 6.8 million times.

Adele's sales in the UK have continued to climb and last year 21 was the second-biggest seller according to data from the Official Charts Company, behind Emeli Sande's Our Version Of Events.

Despite being released nearly two years ago, 21 amassed a further 786,000 copies in 2012, bringing UK sales to 4.6 million.

It has now overtaken Oasis's (What's the Story) Morning Glory? to become the fourth biggest-selling album of all time in the UK.

Retailer HMV has reported that it sold its one millionth copy of the the album during the Christmas period.