Adele's new album 25 will not be streamed on Spotify

Adele, who is poised to have the bestselling album of the year when her third record, 25, is released worldwide on Friday, will not make it available on streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music.

The singer, who is said to have been personally involved with the decision, is following in the footsteps of Taylor Swift, who pulled her music from Spotify late in 2014, over complaints about the royalties paid by streaming outlets.

In a statement, Spotify said: “We love and respect Adele, as do her 24m fans on Spotify. We hope that she will give those fans the opportunity to enjoy 25 on Spotify alongside 19 and 21 very soon.”

25 is not expected to stream on Apple Music either. Swift most recently took on Apple for not paying musicians during a three-month free trial for its new music streaming service, but changed her mind when the company agreed to compensate the artists.

Predictions for 25’s sales are astronomical, with industry forecasters on Wednesday estimating that she could sell as many as 2.5m units during the album’s first week of release. No album since N Sync’s No Strings Attached – which sold 2.4m copies in the US in 2000 during its first week – has managed the feat.

Billboard reports that 3.6m physical copies of the album have been sent to American record shops, assumed to be the largest order of a newly-released CD in a decade. The album will be released at midnight on iTunes and Amazon, and in shops on Friday. Some record stores will be open just before midnight to sell the CD to eager fans.

Hello, the lead single off of 25, debuted at No 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. Over the course of a week, the song was downloaded 1.1m times, almost doubling the previous record set by Flo Rida, who sold 600,000 downloads of Right Round in a week in February 2009. Meanwhile, the video for Hello – directed by French Canadian film-maker Xavier Dolan – has been viewed more than 400m times.

On Tuesday, Adele performed a concert for fans at Radio City Music Hall, which was filmed by NBC for a special to be broadcast next month. She’s next slated to perform on Saturday Night Live on Saturday.

The album has received broadly positive reviews, though the Guardian’s critic Alexis Petridis described it as safe. He writes: “Clearly no one buys an Adele album expecting bleeding-edge sonic innovation, in much the same way that no one buys a Sleaford Mods album in the hope of finding a tear-jerking ballad suitable for performing at The X Factor final, but the feeling that it doesn’t all have to be quite as rounded-edged as this is hard to shake.”