{"id":211226,"date":"2025-10-14T01:48:11","date_gmt":"2025-10-14T01:48:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/211226\/"},"modified":"2025-10-14T01:48:11","modified_gmt":"2025-10-14T01:48:11","slug":"taylor-swifts-new-album-smashes-sales-records-in-first-week","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/211226\/","title":{"rendered":"Taylor Swift\u2019s new album smashes sales records in first week"},"content":{"rendered":"

Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for free<\/p>\n

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.<\/p>\n

Taylor Swift has broken the first week US sales record with her album The Life of a Showgirl, selling more than 4mn units \u2014 the biggest debut since data tracking began in 1991.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 25, which sold 3.4mn copies in 2015.<\/p>\n

Swift\u2019s tally, for an album that has been met with mixed reviews<\/a> from critics, is unprecedented in the streaming era, when physical sales have largely collapsed. Other top-tier pop acts, including Beyonc\u00e9, Billie Eilish and Kendrick Lamar, have sold in the range of about 200,000-400,000 album units in their first week \u2014 which are considered strong performances. <\/p>\n

Industry blog Hits Daily Double called it \u201cthe biggest moment in the sales history of the business\u201d, crediting Swift\u2019s \u201cability to be ubiquitous in this ultra-segmented media era\u201d.<\/p>\n

The 35-year-old Swift<\/a> has long been one of the world\u2019s most successful pop stars, after rising to fame with 2008\u2019s Fearless.<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

Her previous album, last year\u2019s The Tortured Poets Department, sold 2.6mn copies in its first week \u2014 a figure seen at the time as extraordinary. The Life of a Showgirl has surpassed it by a wide margin.<\/p>\n

The new album is Swift\u2019s 12th studio release and is distributed by Universal Music Group, which takes a percentage of her sales.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 or 3,750 from free, ad-supported ones \u2014 as one album sale.<\/p>\n

Vinyl has undergone a renaissance as passionate fans have embraced records as both collectibles and statements of loyalty.<\/p>\n

The trend began with K-pop but has expanded to the US with stars such as Swift, who has embraced the model.<\/p>\n

Recommended<\/p>\n

\"Taylor<\/a><\/p>\n

The Life of a Showgirl was released in vinyl, CD, cassette and digital variants \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

Swift said on Monday: \u201cI\u2019ll never forget how excited I was in 2006 when my first album sold 40,000 copies in its first week.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHere we are all these years later and a hundred times that many people showed up for me this week.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":211227,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[49,48,75,341],"class_list":{"0":"post-211226","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-music"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=211226"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211226\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/211227"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=211226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=211226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=211226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}