Taylor Swift’s new album smashes sales records in first week

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Taylor Swift has broken the first week US sales record with her album The Life of a Showgirl, selling more than 4mn units — the biggest debut since data tracking began in 1991. 

Of those 4mn, 3.5mn were sales of vinyl, CDs, cassettes and digital downloads, while 500,000 came from streaming, according to data company Luminate. The figure eclipses the previous record set by Adele’s 25, which sold 3.4mn copies in 2015.

Swift’s tally, for an album that has been met with mixed reviews from critics, is unprecedented in the streaming era, when physical sales have largely collapsed. Other top-tier pop acts, including Beyoncé, Billie Eilish and Kendrick Lamar, have sold in the range of about 200,000-400,000 album units in their first week — which are considered strong performances.

Industry blog Hits Daily Double called it “the biggest moment in the sales history of the business”, crediting Swift’s “ability to be ubiquitous in this ultra-segmented media era”.

The 35-year-old Swift has long been one of the world’s most successful pop stars, after rising to fame with 2008’s Fearless.

But in recent years her commercial power has reached a new level. Music executives place her in a rarefied group alongside Madonna, The Beatles, Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson for her ability to sell records at scale.

Her previous album, last year’s The Tortured Poets Department, sold 2.6mn copies in its first week — a figure seen at the time as extraordinary. The Life of a Showgirl has surpassed it by a wide margin.

The new album is Swift’s 12th studio release and is distributed by Universal Music Group, which takes a percentage of her sales.

Luminate, formerly known as Nielsen Music, calculates album-equivalent units that include listening on streaming platforms as well as sales of vinyl, CDs and digital downloads. It counts 1,250 streams from paid Spotify accounts — or 3,750 from free, ad-supported ones — as one album sale.

Vinyl has undergone a renaissance as passionate fans have embraced records as both collectibles and statements of loyalty.

The trend began with K-Pop but has expanded to the US with stars such as Swift, who has embraced the model.

The Life of a Showgirl was released in vinyl, CD, cassette and digital variants — a strategy that analysts say helped boost first-week sales. There were 38 different versions of the album available for purchase, including 16 CDs and eight vinyl LPs.

Swift said on Monday: “I’ll never forget how excited I was in 2006 when my first album sold 40,000 copies in its first week.”

“Here we are all these years later and a hundred times that many people showed up for me this week.”