January 4, 2012 4:00 PM ET
WINNER OF THE (LAST) YEAR: No guessing necessary:
Adele. Her final U.S. album sales tally, according to today's year-end
Nielsen Soundscan data, was 5.82 million. That dwarfs the best-selling
album of 2010, Eminem's Recovery, by more than 2.8 million –
and helps explain why, for the first time since 2004, record sales
actually increased by 1 percent. Beyond Adele's 21, though, things were a bit thin. Number Two was Michael Bublé's Christmas, at 2.45 million, which would have ranked just Number Five had it come out the previous year. After that was Lady Gaga's Born This Way,
which seems like a blockbuster at 2.1 million but needed an Amazon MP3
discount of $1.99 to move several hundred thousand copies in its first
week. LMFAO, the year's dominant single-seller, finished second to the
Adele juggernaut with 5.47 million copies of "Party Rock Anthem,"
compared to 5.81 million of "Rolling in the Deep." (Interestingly,
Foster the People's "Pumped Up Kicks" didn't make the Top Five.)
