Taylor Swift’s latest album, The Life of a Showgirl, has shot straight to the top of the charts, smashing records along the way.
A wild surge of 4.002 million album units, with most of them being actual purchases and a massive 1.3 million on vinyl, means Swift has outdone Adele’s 25 for the biggest sales week since 2015, according to Billboard and Luminate. That’s a lot of people listening, buying, and probably even dancing in their rooms. She even said on Instagram, “I have 4 million thank you’s I want to send to the fans, and 4 million reasons to feel even more proud of this album than I already was. Thank you for going out to celebrate this project in the movie theaters, investing in vinyl, streaming, watching the video, buying CDs, reading the poems I wrote inside the packaging, and immersing yourselves in The Life of a Showgirl. I’ll cherish this feeling forever.”
It’s kind of wild to think about, but now Taylor has more No. 1 albums than Drake and Jay-Z, making her second only to the Beatles, who still sit at the top with 19. Every single one of the top 12 spots on the Billboard Hot 100 was taken up by songs from her new album—and “The Fate of Ophelia” is at No. 1. She’s done this before, too, filling up the top 10 with Midnights and The Tortured Poets Department in other years.
Fans think it’s cool when artists break records like this.
This album, which she first told everyone about in August, includes a song with Sabrina Carpenter as well as tracks made with Max Martin and Shellback—the same team she worked with on Red, 1989, and Reputation. To make things even bigger, she kicked off the album with a special movie event in theaters, and now there’s even more coming: a six-episode docuseries called Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour | The End of an Era and a concert film, The Eras Tour | The Final Show, both hitting Disney+ in December.
5 Takeaways From Taylor Swift’s New Album The Life of a Showgirl
