So it’s been 11 weeks since Adele first went in at number one in the album chart with “21″. It’s a simple name for a simple album. As with her previous effort “19″ the cover just has her face on it. If you brought this before a marketing executive they would be most likely to bin it. An overweight lady who sings striped back ballads. The best you could hope for is they might compartmentalise them somewhere in their minds next to the likes of Lykke Li, and give it limited exposure. Yet it is this album that has accounted for one in every ten album sales the first 3 months of 2011. She’s shifted 1.9 million of “21″ so far, and it looks like “19″ will sell reach the half million mark from this bounce alone.
Even more unlikely has been her single sales. Albums are where credible artists succeed, or so the theory goes.
So how did she do it? Well her start was fortuitous. Amy Winehouse had gone off the rails, and Duffy hadn’t quite filled her shoes. At the same time Kate Nash was showing there was plenty of room for singers with mockney accents, preferably fresh out of Brits school. She got signed to XL – they have enough brilliant artists (have a look here) for us to believe they didn’t package her this way – but you can bet it made it a lot easier to get her on Radio One – who played endlessly her Chasing Pavements song (surely her silliest lyric and weakest song).
It wasn’t until Hometown Glory people sat up and listened. It was more haunting and more than standard pop tune. You could really tell she was behind the lyrics. She rounded off her first spate in the limelight with “Make You Feel My Love”, which we mainly remember for showing off her vocals.
Then came the year in the lab. Working away. She came back out around the same time as Duffy, and the difference couldn’t be more stark. As Duffy got basically ignored Adele ripped out the blocks. It seems something wonderful had happened to her in her year out – she got hurt – hurt really bad in a painful break up that she transcribed in every detail. The first single got to number 2 and was brilliant (though for us the remix by Jamie XX was even better).
Then came “Someone Like You” – but more importantly came this moment:
We’re not massive fans of Corden, but he summed it up brilliantly. Just a piano and a voice.
Beyond the importance of this run in the charts though is this point. Adele isn’t a celebrity, though she is in showbiz. You won’t see her playing it up for heat. She won’t sacrifice music for dancing. Yet her songs are at the heart of the 1.5% increase in total album sales year on year.
She’s about to get knocked off the top spot by the Foo Fighters, but what does her album’s success mean? Has it set a template for new artists coming through? The public have voted with their wallets. If it doesn’t cause a change then pop music doesn’t bow to money as most suggest, it bows to marketing idiots chasing the demographic that doesn’t really exist.
