{"id":203474,"date":"2025-10-10T17:38:08","date_gmt":"2025-10-10T17:38:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/203474\/"},"modified":"2025-10-10T17:38:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-10T17:38:08","slug":"taylor-swift-scores-second-biggest-uk-charts-opening-week-ever-with-the-life-of-a-showgirl-taylor-swift","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/203474\/","title":{"rendered":"Taylor Swift scores second-biggest UK charts opening week ever with The Life of a Showgirl | Taylor Swift"},"content":{"rendered":"

Taylor Swift\u2019<\/a>s 12th album, The Life of a Showgirl, has given the US pop star her biggest-ever opening week on the UK chart.<\/p>\n

It is her 14th No 1 album (she has also scored No 1s with the Taylor\u2019s Version rerecordings of previous albums), moving 432,000 combined units in its first week on the Official Chart. It is second only to Ed Sheeran\u2019s \u00f7, released in 2017 to 672,000 first-week sales.<\/p>\n

Only the Beatles and Robbie Williams have had more UK No 1 albums than Swift, with 15 apiece. At a concert in London last night, Williams admitted<\/a> that he had pushed back the release of his album Britpop from last Friday \u2013 The Life of a Showgirl\u2019s release day \u2013 to 2026 because of Swift: \u201cI could pretend it\u2019s not, but it is. It\u2019s selfish. I want a 16th No 1 album.\u201d<\/p>\n

Swift has now surpassed Elvis Presley, with 13 No 1 albums, and is tied with the Rolling Stones. No one else has notched up so many No 1 albums in such a short time: the Official Charts Company said that since 2012, the 35-year-old pop star has averaged more than one a year.<\/p>\n

The Life of a Showgirl also scores the biggest first-week UK vinyl sales since modern chart records began in 1994, as well as the most UK album streams in a single week.<\/p>\n

Swift also claims the entire top three songs in the UK Top 40. Lead single The Fate of Ophelia is at No 1, with the biggest opening week since 2021\u2019s Christmas No 1, LadBaby\u2019s Sausage Rolls for Everyone featuring Ed Sheeran and Elton John. At No 2 is Opalite and 3 is Elizabeth Taylor<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Official Charts\u2019 chief executive, Martin Talbot, said in a statement: \u201cWhat an incredible week for Taylor Swift<\/a>, which has topped the many other incredible weeks of her career. Her list of achievements this week is extraordinary, not least the fact that The Life of a Showgirl has just registered comfortably the biggest first week in the UK of her career. Taylor is bigger than she has ever been in the UK \u2013 and shows absolutely no sign of letting up.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the US, Swift beat Adele\u2019s first-week sales record<\/a>, selling 3.5m units in under a week with two days of the chart window still to go; in 2015, Adele sold 3.482m copies of her third album, 25, in its initial release week. Swift\u2019s previous album, last year\u2019s The Tortured Poets Department, sold 2.51m units in its first week.<\/p>\n

skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n

Get music news, bold reviews and unexpected extras. Every genre, every era, every week<\/p>\n

Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com<\/a> to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy<\/a>. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/p>\n

The new album\u2019s accompanying cinematic release, Taylor Swift: The Official Release Party of a Showgirl, topped the global box office, making $34m at the US over its three-day release, and \u00a33.5m in the UK. The Guardian\u2019s Adrian Horton rated it two stars<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The record has received mixed reviews, from five stars at Rolling Stone to one star from the Standard and two from the Guardian\u2019s Alexis Petridis.<\/p>\n

In an interview with Apple Music\u2019s Zane Lowe, Swift indicated that she was aware of the divided response<\/a>. \u201cI welcome the chaos. The rule of showbusiness is if it\u2019s the first week of my album release and you are saying either my name or my album title, you\u2019re helping,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd art, I have a lot of respect for people\u2019s subjective opinions on art. I\u2019m not the art police. It\u2019s like everybody is allowed to feel exactly how they want. And what our goal is as entertainers is to be a mirror.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Taylor Swift\u2019s 12th album, The Life of a Showgirl, has given the US pop star her biggest-ever opening…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":203475,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[64,63,134,344],"class_list":["post-203474","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-entertainment","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203474","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=203474"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203474\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/203475"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=203474"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=203474"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=203474"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}