6 Months Later, Adele Gives Her Album To Streaming Services

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Now that the real money’s been made…

Adele has never been a fan of music streaming services and has admitted that she doesn’t use streaming services herself.  Instead, she prefers to buy physical CDs or download a song or album.  When discussing with TIME why she didn’t originally put her album on streaming services, Adele said…

”I don’t use streaming. I buy my music. I download it, and I buy a physical [copy] just to make up for the fact that someone else somewhere isn’t. It’s a bit disposable, streaming.”

But, today (June 23rd), Adele’s latest album, titled ’25,’ is available on Spotify and Apple Music.  That’s over a half a year after the album was officially released, and after most of the biggest profits have been made.  ’25’ is Adele’s third album and was the most popular album of 2015.

Just to highlight how successful the album was, the hit single ‘Hello’ hit a billion views on YouTube in just 87 days – a new record that was previously held by PSY’s ‘Gangnam Style’.  In its second week  ‘25′ became the first album ever to sell more than a million copies in two different weeks, and it did the same in its third week – that’s three million-selling weeks.

Now that sales have slowed down, it makes perfect strategic sense for the album to be made more widely available across an array of streaming platforms.  Windowing albums from particular streaming service is becoming a more popular strategy for big-name artists.  And if you’re a mega superstar like Adele — who has a fan base that will download and purchase — then streaming can quickly become an afterthought.