Adele's '25' sells 3.38M in first week

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a number.

Adele's blockbuster 25 has sold a record-shattering 3.38 million copies in its first week, according to Nielsen Music. It easily bests early projections of 2.5 million made more than a week ago.

As Billboard reports, that's the largest sales week since Nielsen started tracking album sales in 1991. It's the first album to ever sell more than 3 million copies in one week and only the second to pass 2 million (the first was NSYNC's No Strings Attached, with 2.416 million sold in 2000).

Already, 25 is the biggest selling album of the year so far (nearly doubling the 1.8 million copies Taylor Swift's 1989 has moved in 2015). It will debut atop the Billboard200 album chart this week, making it Adele's second No. 1 album after her similarly mammoth 21. For comparison, 21 started with 352,000 copies sold its first week in March 2011, going on to sell more than 11 million in the USA