Adele is going for a milestone.
Sources reveal that Columbia Records will ship 3.6 million physical copies of the singer's new album 25 in the U.S., which would probably mark the largest number of new-release CDs shipped in the past decade. The last album to ship more than that would have been *NSYNC's No Strings Attached, which shipped 4.2 million units back in 2000.
As of Nov. 18, insiders tell Billboard that parent company Sony Music is projecting first-week CD sales of 1.5 million, while Apple digital sales are expected to be about 900,000. Overall downloads should come in at about 1 million units. Sources also suggest that preorders at iTunes will wind up at about 450,000, while Amazon’s pre-orders have already topped 100,000, for both CDs and MP3s.