Taylor Swift has, for the 11th time, debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart with massive first-week sales, Billboard reports. Midnights has sold more than a million copies since its release on October 21, including more than half a million vinyl sales, thanks in part to an array of sleeve designs that encouraged fans to purchase multiple copies. Its total of 1.578 million equivalent album units makes it the biggest-selling album in almost seven years, including the most physical sales since Luminate began tracking them in 1991.
The last album to achieve larger first-week sales was Adele’s 25, which debuted with 3.482 million units in December of 2015. As of now, Swift ties Barbra Streisand for the most No. 1 albums among female artists. She is also the sixth musician with more than 10 No. 1 LPs—a club that includes the Beatles, Drake, Jay-Z, Bruce Springsteen, and Streisand. In addition to being this year’s top-selling LP by overall sales, Midnights also hails the largest sales week for an album since Swift’s 2017 full-length, Reputation.
Arctic Monkeys’ The Car was also in this week’s top 10, matching the band’s previous Billboard chart best of No. 6, for AM. Over in the United Kingdom, the record is the band’s first ever to miss out on No. 1 after Swift charted strongly in the midweeks and took the top spot after moving 204,000 in the country. (The Car landed at No. 2 after selling more than 100,000 units.)
Swift’s release strategy has renewed debate around pop artists’ capitalization on the vinyl revival, which clogs pressing plants and delays smaller releases. As Billboard noted, the 500,000 LPs Swift has shifted are “more than most artists can now manufacture, let alone sell.”
Read “Why Are Independent Artists and Labels Turning Away From Vinyl?” on the Pitch.
