Welcome Back, Adele

With initially little fanfare, Adele came back to the world last week with her first single in several years, a tear-jerker called “Hello.”

The world responded by going bonkers for her song, smashing records left, right and center.

In Canada, the song, the first single from her upcoming album 25, was downloaded more than 140,000 times, easily claiming the top download spot. As Alan Cross notes over at A Journal of Musical Things, a #1 song usually gets about a tenth of that in any given week. Justin Bieber’s latest release, “Sorry,” is just that, bringing in one hundred thousand fewer downloads.

Additionally, “Hello” was streamed almost 4.8 million times in a matter of days, obliterating any record for songs streamed in Canada in a given week, once again topping Bieber by 800,000 and leaving Drake’s “Hotline Bling” in the dust with 2.7 million more streams.

In the States, the song crushed the Billboard singles charts with 1.11 million downloads, something ever before accomplished in a single week. Looking at streaming, the song was played 61.4 million times in the US, triple the average rate for the average top streaming single there in a week.

Billboard  notes that the song breaks the weekly downloads record, previously held by Flo Rida’s “Right Round,” which had 636,000 downloads for the week of February 28, 2009. The song also is the 24th song to debut in the #1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 chart’s history, putting Adele in the company of Bieber– whose song “What Do You Mean” hit the same mark eight weeks ago– and Taylor Swift, whose “Shake It Off” entered the chart at #1 last September and made her the last woman to have a song enter the charts at the top.

This is also Adele’s fourth song to hit #1 in the Hot 100 chart, following “Rolling in the Deep,” “Someone Like You” and “Set Fire to the Rain.”

Billboard‘s full breakdown of just how remarkable Adele’s return is for the music industry, at least this week, can be found here. Adele probably would’ve sent out a series of happy tweets when she got the news, but she’s not allowed.

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