As expected, Taylor Swift’s new album The Life of a Showgirl has broken records on its way to the No. 1 spot on the Billboard charts. Swift’s 15th LP debuted with 4.002 million equivalent album units (including pure album sales and streaming activity), with pure album sales totaling 3,479,500, 1.3 million of which were vinyl sales, Billboard reports via Luminate. The figures best the modern-era record for an overall sales week set by Adele’s 25, with 3.482 million units, in 2015.
“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,” Swift wrote on Instagram celebrating the news. “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.”
Swift’s eye-watering numbers have broken her out of a tie with Drake and Jay-Z for the most No. 1 albums among soloists, and she is now the only act with the second-most No. 1s since the Billboard 200 began publishing on a weekly basis in 1956 (the Beatles still currently hold the record with 19 No. 1s). Additionally, the top 12 songs on the Billboard Hot 100 this week are occupied by the entirety of The Life of a Showgirl, with “The Fate of Ophelia” claiming the top spot. Swift previously filled the top 10 with Midnights in 2022 and The Tortured Poets Department in 2024.
Swift announced The Life of a Showgirl in August. It features Sabrina Carpenter on the title track, and she worked on the album with Max Martin and Shellback, the Swedish production duo who were behind the boards on 2012’s Red, 2014’s 1989, and 2017’s Reputation. Swift launched the album alongside a limited-time cinema event that topped the box office and, earlier today, announced even more supplementary material: Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour | The End of an Era, a six-episode docuseries capturing Swift on the Eras Tour, and The Eras Tour | The Final Show, a concert film featuring the tour’s final show at Vancouver’s BC Place, both premiere on Disney+ in December.
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