It's me, hi: Taylor Swift scores record-breaking #1 debut with 'Midnights'

Beth Garrabrant/TAS Rights Management

Taylor Swift may think of herself as an "Anti-Hero," but her album sales are certainly heroic.

Her new release, Midnights, has blasted into the Billboard 200 album chart at number one, with the biggest first-week sales for an album in almost seven years. According to Luminate, the company that provides sales data to Billboard, it sold 1.578 million equivalent album units. The last time an album sold that much in a week was Adele's 2015 blockbuster 25, which moved around 3.5 million units.

And that's not the only milestone that Midnights has achieved.  It's Taylor's 11th number-one album, tying her with Barbra Streisand for the most chart-toppers among female artists.  She's only the sixth act overall to score more than 10 number-one albums since the album chart started back in 1956. The others are The Beatles, who rule with 19, followed by JAY-Z with 14, and Drake, Bruce Springsteen and Streisand, who all have 11.

Here are a few more Midnights milestones: It's now the top-selling album of 2022, and it's broken the modern-era record for single-week U.S. vinyl sales.  Midnights' sales of 575,000 LPs make it the biggest week for a vinyl album since Luminate began tracking sales in 1991.

Plus, Taylor's now the most-streamed artist in Spotify history, with more than 35 billion streams in total.

Finally, Taylor now has five albums that have each sold at least a million copies in a single week: She's the only artist ever to do that. In addition to Midnights, she hit the million mark with Speak Now, Red, 1989 and Reputation.  Speaking of Reputation, Midnights had the biggest sales week for any album since Reputation, which moved 1.216 million copies upon its release in 2017.

Monday, October 31, 2022 at 6:00AM by Andrea Dresdale Permalink