Will Ed Sheeran’s ÷ be 2017’s biggest selling album?

Ed Sheeran’s album ÷ (pronounced “Divide”) dropped globally last Friday, with the huge expectation that it will be the year’s fastest moving and biggest selling album.

There’s no doubt that it will eventually outsell his last album, 2014’s x, which has now sold 13 million worldwide.

Retailers in the US and UK are confident it will break some records at least – but agree that it won’t come near Adele’s phenomenal sales for 25.

“She’s a totally different dynamic,” said one buyer for a US-wide chain.

In the UK, the figure being bandied around is 300,000 to 400,000 sales in its first week in that country – which would beat the 180,000 first week of x and 102,000 of his 2011 debut +.

Adele’s 25 is the current record holder with 803,000 first week sales in 2015. It is followed by Oasis’ Be Here Now (August 1997) with 696,000 (after three days), Take That’s Progress (2010) with 518,601, Coldplay’s X&Y (2005) with 464,471 and Take That’s The Circus (2008) with 432,490.

In the US, early expectations are expected for a #1 debut with equivalent album units between 350,000 and 425,000 in its first week. It would be his second US chart topper.

Last December, debuting at #1 were J. Cole’s 4 Your Eyez Only with 492,000 in its first week and The Weeknd’s Starboy with 348,000.

US retailers attribute a strong response for ÷ to a number of factors.

Releasing two singles simultaneously – the folk-pop Shape Of You and the U2-style acoustic stadium anthem Castle On The Hill,reaching a wide variety of consumers and radio formats – was a masterstroke in setting up the album. Particularly when Shape Of You has been a long-time #1. However, Sheeran himself thinks Castle will be the single that will be remembered in 20 years.

Retailers also point out that Sheeran has the sort of demographic that would see ÷ do strongly in digital and physical CD/vinyl formats. Like Adele, Sheeran’s fans include those who may only buy one album a year.

There are also no other superstar albums, with long shelf lives, being released around this time.

Retailers also believe that ÷ will equal Drake’s Views in setting new records for streaming.

Sheeran’s manager Stuart Camp of Rocket Music told Music Week, “I do worry that some people might be getting a little silly on what they expect. But I’m not worried about it. Does that sound horribly conceited?

“There’s someone very close to me and this project who thinks it’ll do 350K [in week one] and I’d be very happy with that. That’s one of your best band’s lifetime best sales. Even the big sales are usually around 200K. So I’d be ecstatic.

“But really I’m thinking, ’What will we have sold by the end of 2018?’ It’s about the long game.”

Even record executives from such rival record companies as Columbia, Parlophone and Polydor agreed in a Music Week poll it was going to be the biggest album of 2017, and possibly beyond.

Last Friday, the release of ÷ saweight Sheeran songs rocketing to the top 10 of the Billboard + Twitter Trending 140 chart. It measures the real-time acceleration of conversation around artists and their music on Twitter.

The track Perfect lasted the longest, of five hours.

Perfect, written about Sheeran’s “beautiful and smart” girlfriend Cherry Seaborn, is also the song on the album that Sheeran gleefully says he’s managed to better Thinking Out Loud with.

“It proved to me that Thinking Out Loud is not the peak of my career, so as a result, I’ve never even thought about how the new album will go saleswise or on the charts.”