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I'm hoping her comeback will help give Hello enough of a push on downloads to be a million seller, I know it was only around 50,000 from it the last figures we had in 2017. I expect it would be the last released song ever to reach a million pure sales although a few older ones might get there eventually.

I doubt it will as downloads are so vanishingly small. Even the lower end of the Top 100 only do about 200 per week now, so even if it had been hanging around the Top 100 it would have been doing about 10k per year (and it hasn’t). Basically nothing is likely to ever reach that milestone again unless it’s already extremely close.

 

Nice to see some love for Cold Shoulder which I adore too! I have unconventional taste when it comes to Adele as I really don’t like Someone Like You or Hello but I also love Set Fire To The Rain, Skyfall and When We Were Young.

 

 

They may have meant to say 'first ever #1 debut' re: 'Hello'. Although it is the OCC so maybe they just messed up. x

 

Now corrected on OCC site.

 

Hello? It's her. Adele's second UK Number 1

One thing amazing about Adele and pretty unique for a star her size (unless missing someone else really obvious) is zero collaborations. All her own solo work.

She's never had collaborators on her own songs but she did do a couple of features for other artists early in her career.

 

Ed Sheeran also usually has no features on his albums. Apart from that one where the entire gimmick was having a feature on every song of course.

Poor Cold Shoulder, it’s such a good song too.

Nice to see some more love for Cold Shoulder in this thread. I do feel 19 is quite underrated altogether to be honest, two of my other all time Adele favourites are Hometown Glory and Melt My Heart To Stone from that album.

'Cold Shoulder' being so far behind all of her other top 40 hits (well apart from 'I Can't Make You Love Me' lol) is quite a shame, I suppose it makes the title quite fitting for it though :lol:

 

I think my top 5 singles from her would be 'Set Fire To The Rain', 'Rolling In The Deep', 'Skyfall', 'Hometown Glory' and then... #5 is hard to pick (most of the others honestly are on about the same level for me) but let's go with 'When We Were Young'. 'Turning Tables' would be somewhere up there too including album tracks.

I can't believe 'Cold Shoulder' is languishing at the bottom of the top 20 and not even silver. :o

Re Someone Like You was it a single at the time it was performed at the BRITs or did it just slay off the back of that? It was such a moment and an iconic performance but am I right that at the time it was just an album track?

 

Although 'Rolling In The Deep' had only been released on 17 January 2011 as lead single and was receiving associated promotion, many sources including Discogs record the release date of 'Someone Like You' as a stand-alone single on download as being 24 January 2011. Obviously that corresponds with the release date of the parent album '21' and so it would also have been available to download from the digital release of that, but it does seem that it was given its own discrete issue a week after its predecessor, possibly for the reasons Bre gives regarding its already-well-received live performances before the BRITS 2011. So in fact the answer is yes, technically it was already a 'single' ahead of the BRITS performance, albeit one that wasn't being directly promoted at that point. Incidentally, Discogs records the release of the live BRITS version of the song on download as being 17 March 2011; for chart purposes its sales of course would've been combined with the original single and album track tallies as per OCC rules.

The song for all intents and purposes became a single soon as the Brits were over, I seem to remember Radio being very quick to latch on to it and of course the live version shot straight up to #1. I'm sure they were planning for it to be a single at some point even if Brits didn't give it such a mammoth boost.

The song for all intents and purposes became a single soon as the Brits were over, I seem to remember Radio being very quick to latch on to it and of course the live version shot straight up to #1. I'm sure they were planning for it to be a single at some point even if Brits didn't give it such a mammoth boost.

 

Yes, it's true. Most radio stations started playing it the day after BRITs performance if I remember correctly (and interestingly, the first couple of weeks, THE actual BRITs performance got a lot of airplay rather than the album version), but it was 100% definitely an album track when it reached #1. It was the first time it ever happened I think. And I think it would have been #1 anyway even if radio decided to refuse to play it because it wasn't an official single.

 

It was a long time ago so I can't remember perfectly, but I think there were rumours that Set Fire To the Rain was going to be the 2nd single

 

Some post album singles before then did get to #1 1-2 months before their release dates (off memory ones like Airplanes and What's My Name? I think), but that was different, because they had the same promotion schedule as pre-album singles where they would get airplay 2-3 months before their official release day. So when they got to #1, we knew they were singles and they were already being played by radio. So amazing as those songs (or frankly any post-album single that gets to #1 is), it's different when it's an full-on album track that we weren't expecting to be released.

 

And some might say "It's a single because it was performed on TV". It's not true. People like Jessie J, Ed Sheeran and Emeli Sandé and others performed album tracks on TV, nobody says they were singles today, theirs just didn't fly to #1 and have all the radio stations adding it to their playlists as a result, that's the only difference.

Rumour Has It certified Gold today now means that One & Only is the only outlier in the top 15 to reach 400K.

Still annoys me how Set Fire never made the top 10 even though it was there in the midweeks at least twice. Such a tune of hers and in my top two from her personally. I’m sure it even cleared 600k on downloads alone at the time whilst 21 was flying off the shelves.

 

What’s also striking is just how successful the singles have been, given she hasn’t actually released that many. 3/4 of them have shifted a million units and even with streaming not being added she had six in a row that sold between 800k-1600k whilst the albums also sold very heavily. I reckon someone like you could really move up if 30 is another huge success.

Incidentally, Discogs records the release of the live BRITS version of the song on download as being 17 March 2011; for chart purposes its sales of course would've been combined with the original single and album track tallies as per OCC rules.

 

I'm not sure where that date comes from as it was definitely released to download immediately after the performance so a full month before that!

 

edit: I see that iTunes itself actually lists the release date as 17/3/11 as well weirdly enough, perhaps it got removed and re-added. It looks like the other BRITs performances that were made available to download are no longer on iTunes at all.

Sales aside, the biggest travesty is that Rolling in the Deep was never No.1 in the UK

I'm not sure where that date comes from as it was definitely released to download immediately after the performance so a full month before that!

 

edit: I see that iTunes itself actually lists the release date as 17/3/11 as well weirdly enough, perhaps it got removed and re-added. It looks like the other BRITs performances that were made available to download are no longer on iTunes at all.

Yeah, it was re-uploaded at some point, seemingly changing the copyright from 'BRIT Awards Limited' to XL. The original release has a date of 16 February 2011: https://web.archive.org/web/20110219015554/...rom/id420764060

 

The standalone single dated 24 January 2011 exists, but I'm not convinced it was actually released then, as opposed to being later uploaded with that retrospective date. It only first appeared on her Amazon MP3 artist page at some point between 18 February 2011 and 3 March 2011 (see the previous snapshots with no sign of it), and doesn't appear on her iTunes page on this snapshot from 28 January 2011 or any time until at least 2017 or later.

I think from memory, although it wasn't officially confirmed the general consensus was 'Someone Like You' being mooted as the second single and it garnered a lot of hype. There were other possibilities being discussed, but I think only rumour had it (pun fully intended)

 

Then the performance happened and the rest was history.

I actually looked up the iTunes thread from the time to prove to myself I wasn't going crazy that the live version of SLY was dropped immediately after the performance and I did see a post from my 14 year old self saying that 'Set Fire To The Rain' was meant to be the 2nd single. I was probably just parroting speculation from someone else but still.

 

I'm not linking it because no one deserves to read posts from 14 year old me.

With 'Love In The Dark' seeing a bit on an increase over the past week or so I wonder if it'll find it's way on this list in a year or so.

With 'Love In The Dark' seeing a bit on an increase over the past week or so I wonder if it'll find it's way on this list in a year or so.

Let’s hope cold shoulder gets picked up on TikTok before it gets the chance :P