Everyone in the solar system is buying Adele's new album

You may have noticed that, in the picture accompanying this story, Adele is pointing one finger skywards. It would be possible to imagine that the famed singer is signalling that she knows something we don’t about the place her new album, “25,” will land on the charts next week, except for one fact: we all know exactly what’s going to happen with this colossal blockbuster.

“25” is going to be the number one album in America. It’s going to be the number one album in Canada. It’s going to be the number one album in Germany, Indonesia, the Vatican (you just know Pope Francis is a fan), Matt Damon’s space colony on Mars and everywhere in between.

None of this is in question. The thing everyone is waiting to see is if Adele will have the biggest first-week album sales of all time. This is 2015, when “buying an album” is the kind of quaint thing you’d find old people lecturing their children about at Thanksgiving, but Adele transcends all rules of time, space and modern capitalism, so she might just do it.

It certainly seems like she’s going to do it in her native United Kingdom, where she instantly sold 300,000 records in one day and is on track to leave the current sales record holders, Oasis, in the dust. In America, she has to beat *NSYNC, which sold a staggering 2.45 million records in a week all the way back in 2000. If she does it, the world will be saying “Bye Bye Bye” to one record holder and “Hello” to another. See what we did there?