For Adele’s millions of fans, perhaps the biggest question about her next album is whether its songs will pack the same emotional wallop that helped make her last record a global smash.
But behind the scenes, music executives are anxiously awaiting another detail: Whether Adele will make her new songs available on streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music or withhold them for a time to propel album sales. With two weeks left before the scheduled release of the album, titled “25,” streaming services are still awaiting the final word.
Adele’s choice will reflect the music industry’s larger debate over how fully to embrace the streaming format. Elite artists like Adele, Taylor Swift and Beyoncé still sell millions of albums on CD or via downloads, and by streaming their new songs immediately, they risk sacrificing those lucrative sales.
Through their success, those three women have also accumulated a rare level of power in the industry, allowing them to take risks over how their music is released and consumed, and the rest of the business has taken notice.
A TV blitz is expected from NBC in coming weeks, including a concert special and an appearance on “Saturday Night Live.” Music executives widely predict that the album could sell well over a million copies in its first week.
“Everything on Top 40 radio now sounds alike, but this is a phenomenon,” said Lenny Beer, the editor of Hits, an industry news and gossip magazine.
Adele’s position on streaming, however, is unclear. When “21” came out, downloads were still an ascendant format and Spotify had not arrived in the United States. (Like other artists at the time, she withheld her album from Spotify for months, a move that has gradually gone out of fashion.)
Now, Spotify is just one of an array of streaming outlets that include Apple, Google, Rdio and Amazon.
Adele is said to be personally involved in deciding whether and how her music should be streamed — an unusual level of involvement for a major star in such a granular business issue.
Representatives for Adele, as well as for Spotify and Apple, declined to comment for this article.
Streaming’s ability to pay fair wages to artists remains deeply disputed. Last year, Ms. Swift removed her catalog from Spotify because the service, which has both free and paid versions, would not restrict her music to the paid level. “It’s my opinion that music should not be free,” Ms. Swift wrote in The Wall Street Journal a few months before the dispute.
Fellow artists cheered Ms. Swift on for taking a stand and for later challenging Apple over its plan to not pay royalties during trials of its new streaming outlet, Apple Music. (She persuaded Apple to change course, but her music is still not on Spotify.) In contrast, Adele has not used her popularity as a vehicle for activism on behalf of artists’ rights. And music executives say that for most acts, streaming remains an essential form of promotion.
“Spotify and others like it have become the new radio play,” said Jim Griffin, a digital media entrepreneur and former record executive. “In a very real way, not being on Spotify is like not being on the radio 10 years ago, and that’s a problem.”
Executives briefed on the plans for Adele’s release said that streaming services had been given no clear indications about whether, or when, the album would become available on those outlets. “Hello” was widely available for streaming, but that may have been a test. In one likely case, the executives said, the album could be withheld from streaming outlets for a week or more to maximize its CD and download sales.
For artists like Adele, CD sales remain a major source of income, and the stores that sell her music are an important promotional partner. Target will sell a deluxe version of the album with three extra songs, an arrangement similar to the one it had last year for Ms. Swift’s album “1989.”
A big-selling album is important for smaller brick-and-mortar shops too, like Newbury Comics, a chain in New England where Adele’s last album, “21,” was the biggest seller in 10 years or more, said Carl Mello, the store’s senior buyer. But one hit is just one hit, and album sales are down 5 percent for the year so far, according to Nielsen.
“I don’t think that one release,” Mr. Mello said, “would ever solve the problems of the music business.”
Even if Adele were to release “25” on streaming services immediately, some analysts believe that her appeal may simply be so broad that she can still count on enormous sales. Adele has amassed an audience that crosses virtually all demographic barriers, appealing to teenagers, their parents and maybe even their grandparents.
“Adele’s reach is so vast, and the anticipation for this release is so great, that she can have scale across multiple categories of consumers,” said Mark Mulligan, a digital media analyst with Midia Research. “She can have a very traditional audience that still wants to go out and buy stuff, as well as a digital-native audience who will not buy much but will stream intensively. Both are giant audiences on their own.”
