Adele's '25' Will Ship 3.6 Million Units in U.S., Could Top *NSYNC's Historic Sales Week

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Industry prognosticators add that the split between CD and digital downloads will probably be around 60/40, a shift from Adele's last album, the 11.2 million-selling 21, where digital only accounted for 28 percent of sales.

If the digital and CD projections are hit, that means Adele would be selling about 2.5 million units in her debut week, which would make it the largest-selling album in a week in Nielsen SoundScan history, which began monitoring album sales in 1991. That record is currently held by *NSYNC’s No Strings Attached, which sold 2.415 million units back in the week ending March 26, 2000.

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At press time, nearly 28 hours from the album's Friday, Nov. 20, street date, it's still unclear if streaming sites will have the album. One service source says the album is not expected to arrive to streamers until the Wednesday after street date but could not say if that applied to all services or if one of the services was getting an exclusive.

In addition to the initial week-one projection of almost 2.5 million, sources add that Sony projects it will sell an additional 1 million CDs over the following three weeks. By Christmas, 25 could be at 4 million units total.