Taylor Swift’s Midnights bulldozes records as it becomes 2022’s best selling album
Taylor Swift. (Terry Wyatt/Getty Images)
Taylor Swift‘s Midnights has achieved the biggest week for an album in nearly seven years and landed at the top of the Billboard 200.
Billboard, which ranks albums using aggregate-based charts compiled by Luminate, takes into account “traditional album sales, track equivalent albums, and streaming equivalent albums” in order the gauge the popularity of a release.
Midnights is Swift’s 11th number one album on the Billboard 200, and marks the biggest week for any album in just shy of seven years.
According to Luminate, the album achieved 1.578 million album units in the U.S. in the week ending 27 October. The last album that earned a larger week was the debut of Adele’s 25, when it earned 3.482 million units in the chart dated 12 December, 2015.
Taylor Swift in her Anti-Hero video. (Taylor Swift/ YouTube)
Midnights has smashed a whole other host of records; it is already 2022’s top-selling album by overall sales through the year, despite only being released 10 days ago (21 October), and has beaten her 2017 record Reputation by tallying the larges sales week for an album since that record was released.
The record for first and second largest streaming week for an album is held by Drake for the debut frame of Scorpion (745.92 million) and Certified Lover Boy (743.67 million), respectively.
Midnights has sold 1.140 million copies, easily becoming 2022’s top-selling album. The previous top-seller was Harry’s House by Harry Styles, with 633,000 copies sold.
Taylor Swift has released Midnights, her 10th studio album. (Getty/Taylor Swift)
It also achieved the third-largest streaming week ever for an album, and the biggest sales week for a vinyl album since Luminate began tracking music sales in 1991. The achievement was aided by the release of four different vinyl covers that fit together to make up a clock face, enticing superfans to purchase all four.
Swift’s album rollout has been highly praised by fans, plus, she has cast trans actor Laith Ashley as her romantic opposite for her as yet unreleased music video for “Lavender Haze”.
Long story short – Taylor Swift is the music industry.
