Adele tops US charts for second time

LONDON: Adele has topped the best-selling record chart in the US for the second year running —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 Mirror reported.

The last time an artist had back-to-back best-sellers was in 1983 and 1984 with Michael Jackson’s Thriller. She has sold 4.6 million copies, making it the fourth biggest selling album ever.

Billboard magazine’s Keith Caulfield said that it’s sort of an once-in-a-lifetime album. 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 reported that it sold its one millionth copy of the album during the Christmas period.