ADELE ASTONISHES AT BRICK & MORTAR RETAIL

As it makes history on a macro level, Adele’s 25 is also breaking records at individual retail chains, from Target (whose endcap display is pictured at left) to Barnes & Noble, which said on Monday that the LP had surpassed the bookseller’s first-day sales mark.

The all-time bestsellers at B&N include Bruce Springsteen’s The Rising (2002), Coldplay’s X&Y (2005), Dave Matthews Band’s Everyday (2001), Josh Groban’s Closer (2003), Norah Jones’ Feels Like Home (2004) and Susan Boyle’s I Dreamed a Dream (2009).

The Wall Street Journal’s coverage began with a “wish we’d thought of that” line: “The album is dead. Long live the album.” After positing that “artists like Adele might be better off shunning streaming services in favor of selling albums the old fashioned way, [which] could mean better economics for those artists and some unexpected upside for brick-and-mortar retailers,” the copy ended with a parallel construct: “The bookstore is dead. But as B&N investors would say, long live the bookstore.”