Despite only being released in November, Adele’s 25 finished 2015 as the best-selling album of the year.
Nielsen released its year-end report on the music industry on Wednesday and it shows that album sales were down 6 percent in 2015. That’s actually a slower decrease than 2014, when album sales were down 11 percent. Vinyl sales might be partly to blame, as sales of the old medium jumped 30 percent and made up 9 percent of total physical album sales in 2015.
The data shows that 125.6 million CDs were sold in 2015, a drop of 10.6 percent. However, that was still ahead of digital album sales, which was at 103.3 million (a 2.9 percent drop over the previous year). In total 241.4 million albums were sold, which was down from 2014’s 257 million total.
But the decline in album sales doesn’t mean that people have stopped listening to music, of course. Nielsen said that on-demand music streaming skyrocketed to 92.8 percent, with 317 billion songs streamed.
Adele’s 25 finished the year with six consecutive weeks at the top of the Billboard 200 album chart. It sold over 7.4 million copies and had the most copies sold for an album within a single calendar year since Usher’s Confessions in 2004. The album hit stores on Nov. 20.