By mid-last week, Taylor Swift had already shattered yet another record in the music industry, with the opening-week sales of her latest album, “The Life of a Showgirl,” surpassing even those of Adele’s “25” from a decade prior. The sole lingering suspense was how astoundingly sky-high those sales figures would climb by the close of the week.The answer? Sky-high, reaching a stratosphere that further cements Swift’s commercial dominance over every other contemporary artist.
According to tracking service Luminate, “The Life of a Showgirl” wrapped up the week with the equivalent of 4,002,000 sales in the United States alone. In 2015, Adele’s “25” blasted out of the gate with 3,482,000 copies sold—a benchmark that stood unchallenged for ten years. Now, a daunting new peak looms over the musical landscape.
“Showgirl” has catapulted Swift to her fifteenth No. 1 album on the Billboard 200 chart, Billboard magazine proclaimed on Monday. Only the Beatles hold a higher tally, with nineteen chart-toppers to their name.
The Swift craze was fueled by her record-smashing Eras Tour, which concluded last year as the highest-grossing concert tour of all time, raking in over $2 billion from 149 shows. On Monday, Swift unveiled two tour-related projects slated for Disney+: “The End of an Era,” a six-episode docuseries delving into the tour’s development and inner workings, with two episodes dropping weekly starting December 12, and “The Final Show,” a concert film capturing the tour’s climactic Vancouver, B.C. finale, also premiering on December 12.
The equivalent sales figure attributed to “Showgirl” is a composite metric that factors in the album’s streaming popularity alongside full-album purchases. A breakdown of those numbers underscores just how thoroughly Swift has conquered every available format.
The album sold a staggering 3,479,500 copies as a complete package across CD, vinyl LPs, downloads, and even cassette tapes. In the streaming era, where crossing a million sales in any format is a rare feat, the Weeknd’s “Hurry Up Tomorrow” leads the non-Swift pack this year with just over 500,000 traditional sales. Moving a million copies in a single week is a milestone achievable by only a vanishing few. Besides Swift and Adele, the last artist to accomplish it was Lady Gaga, who sold 1,108,000 copies of “Born This Way” in May 2011—just before Spotify’s U.S. debut.
“Showgirl” sold an astonishing 1,334,000 vinyl LPs in its first week, shattering a modern-era record set by Swift herself just last year, when she moved 859,000 vinyl copies of “The Tortured Poets Department.”
True to her recent strategy, Swift offered multiple editions of her album. By week’s end, there were 38 in total, according to Billboard, including 27 physical versions (18 CD variants, eight vinyl LPs, and one cassette) and 11 downloadable editions, priced as low as $4.99 and packed with bonus content like acoustic tracks and snippets from Swift’s “voice memo” recording sessions.
The songs on “Showgirl” also racked up 681 million clicks on U.S. streaming platforms. Spotify announced that “The Fate of Ophelia,” the album’s opening track, had become the platform’s most-streamed song in a single week.
Swift first teased “Showgirl” in August during an appearance on the podcast “New Heights,” hosted by her fiancé, Travis Kelce, and his brother, Jason—both football stars. Her promotional blitz included a flurry of interviews during release week and “The Official Release Party of a Showgirl,” an 89-minute spectacle broadcast at hundreds of AMC theaters, which grossed $33 million in tickets across the U.S. and Canada in its opening weekend.
Reaction to the album has been a whirlwind, with critics and fans offering a mix of praise and pointed criticism, including a flurry of social media posts taking issue with, among other things, Swift’s bold lyrics.
In a video interview with Zane Lowe of Apple Music, Swift embraced the “chaos” from listeners, adding: “The rule of show business is: If it’s the first week of my album release and you’re saying either my name or my album title, you’re helping.”
