Adele's new single 'When We Were Young' and where we'll find her album

Adele has released a new single, 'Young,' which will appear on her upcoming album, '25.' Will sales for '25' compare to Adele's previous work '21'? And will the album be available on streaming services?

Adele has released a video for her newest song, “When We Were Young.”

“Young” will appear on the music star's upcoming album, “25,” which will be released on Nov. 20. Adele had previously posted a video for her new song “Hello,” which also appears on “25.” “Hello” is now number one on the Billboard Hot 100 for the week of Nov. 28.

The video for “Young” shows Adele performing the song at London’s Church Studios. 

As one would expect from the release of a new song from a wildly popular artist who hadn’t released music in several years, Adele’s “Hello” instantly became a hit after being posted online last month. It seems a good bet that her album “25” will get a similarly good reception. 

How popular will it be? Billboard recently named Adele’s “21” the biggest album of all time, a standing that was bestowed on the work after Billboard looked at the amount of weeks the album topped Billboard’s 200 list (which ranks albums) as well as the amount of time it was near the top of the chart. (This means it beat out Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” among other works.) So “25” certainly has big shoes to fill. 

Adele is almost an anomaly in the current music business. Not only was “21” the biggest-selling album of 2011, the year in which it was released, and 2012, according to Billboard, its sales were far beyond any of its competitors in 2011. The second-highest-selling album that year, the work “Christmas” by Michael Buble, sold less than half of what “21” did. Judging by these numbers, her music has an incredibly wide appeal across demographics.

Speaking of that word “album,” where will Adele’s newest work be available? Those in the music industry are most likely eager to hear. Some artists continue to make a stand against streaming services like Spotify, with Taylor Swift, for one, taking her music off Spotify (though she did later put her music on Apple Music after she criticized the service for not paying musicians during Apple Music’s trial period and Apple began doing so). It’s all part of the continuing struggle to figure out how artists will be compensated in the current music business. 

Streaming services reportedly don’t know yet whether “25” will arrive on their platforms. 

For artists trying to make a name for themselves, not being on a streaming service could be a problem. “Spotify and others like it have become the new radio play,” Jim Griffin, a former record executive and digital media entrepreneur, said in an interview. “In a very real way, not being on Spotify is like not being on the radio 10 years ago, and that’s a problem.” 

But an artist like Adele or Swift is already a household name. They have more room for negotiations with a streaming service, as when Apple Music reversed its policy on paying artists during the trial period after Swift published her statement on the practice. 

“Adele, like a Taylor Swift, is different from everyone else. She's in her own orbit, basically," Billboard's co-director of charts Keith Caulfield said in an interview.

There’s little doubt “25” will be a hit. The question will be where listeners can find it.