Adele 21 accounted for 5.1% of new music sales in 2011

Sales for the Adele '21' in the USA last year are stagging. The '21' album accounted for 5.1% of all new release album sales during 2011.

Adele '21' sold 5,824,000 units in America last year. It was the first album since Usher 'Confessions' in 2004 to sell more than 5 million. (Usher did 8 million).

1 in 19.43 new music album sales during 2011 was for Adele '21'.

That really plays with the average sale for new releases in 2011.

New release albums released during 2011 in the USA sold an average of 1,472 copies each.

The latest data from Nielsen SoundScan for 2011 shows that during 2011 there were 76,875 albums released that sold at least one copy.

The new album releases accounted for 113,200,000 bringing the average sale to just 1,472 units.

Taking out the sales of Adele '21' alone drops the average down to 1,396.

However, the Top 10 albums sold a combined 20,218,000 alone. Taking off the top 10 albums brings the average down a further 263 sales to 1209.

Album releases were up on 2010 (76,875 vs 75,159) and the good news was overall music sales increased by 6.9% from 1,507,000,000 to 1,611,000,000. (That's 1.6 billion music sales in 2011).

A lot of that figure is inflated with the evolving of the audience buying habits moving from physical to digital and comparing a full album with multiple tracks (1 sale) to a single song download (also considered 1 sale).

CD album sales were down 5.7% or 13,400,000 during 2011. Digital tracks sales were up 8.5% or 99,000,000. If you apply a weighting ratio of x10 to albums to bring them into line with the same number of tracks as single downloads then the industry actually went backwards by around 35 million sales.