By the mid-point of last week, The Life Of A Showgirl had already dethroned Adele’s 25 as the album with the most units sold in a single week. (25 had held the record for a decade prior.) As the week went on, Swift’s lead only grew. Today, Billboard reported that Showgirl had officially landed on the top of its Billboard 200 albums chart as the 15th No. 1 debut of Swift’s career. That separates her from both Drake and Jay-Z as the sole act with the second-most No. 1 albums on the chart, behind only The Beatles with 19.
The fact that Swift’s album debuted at No. 1 isn’t a surprise; every album she’s released since Fearless (including her re-records) has accomplished the same feat. The sheer force with which it broke Adele’s record is still somewhat mindblowing, however. Back in 2015, 25 sold 3,482,000 copies in its first week, per The New York Times. Showgirl just sold 4,002,000. That number, reported by NYT via tracking service Luminate, is a composite of physical and digital purchases, as well as the album’s performance on streaming platforms.
The breakdown of that number is even more staggering. Ignoring the fraction of the above total achieved through streaming, Showgirl sold 3,479,500 copies as a complete package on a variety of different formats (vinyl, CD, digital download, cassette tape, etc.). Part of that number can of course be attributed to the dozens of album variants Swift made available—38 in total, per NYT, including different-colored vinyls, CDs with exclusive acoustic tracks, downloads containing “voice memo” demos, and more. Regardless of how you feel about the gambit, it paid off in spades. In the streaming era, selling complete albums at all is a challenge. Before Showgirl, The Weeknd’s Hurry Up Tomorrow held the record for this year with a little more than 500,000. Showgirl, on the other hand, sold 1,334,000 copies on vinyl alone, beating Swift’s own record for The Tortured Poets Department with 859,000. Showgirl, unsurprisingly, did huge numbers of streaming as well. It garnered 681 million clicks from listeners in the U.S. alone, leading Spotify to announce that opening track “The Fate Of Ophelia” had become the most-streamed song in a single week in the platform’s history.
In addition to all of this record breaking, Swift has yet another Eras Tour film in the works (this time with the addition of the Tortured Poets Department portion of the concert), as well as a six-part Eras Tour documentary series, both of which will premiere on Disney+ this December. Swift will always girlboss close to the sun, but it’s worked out pretty well for her so far.
