With the news, Swift has become the first act to have seven albums each sell at least 500,000 copies in a single week.
Taylor Swift is smashing records once again.
The singer-songwriter’s surprise eighth album, Folklore, which she announced less than 24 hours before its debut last Friday, has topped the Billboard 200 albums chart and achieved the biggest week for any album in the U.S. since Swift’s last release, Lover. At the time, Lover had the biggest debut of any album since her own Reputation, which was released in 2017.
In its first week, Folklore earned 846,000 album units in the U.S., making it the best-selling album of the year to date. Juice WRLD’s Legends Never Die previously held that record, with around 500,000 units sold in its first week. By comparison, Lover premiered to 867,000 equivalent album units.
According to Swift’s record label Universal Music Group, the album has sold over 2 million worldwide, with over half a billion total streams on audio and video in just one week. It also reached No. 1 on iTunes in more than 85 countries.
Folklore also shattered the global record for first-day album streams on Spotify by a female artist with 80.6 million and delivered the most-streamed pop album on Apple Music in 24 hours with 35.47 million streams.
With the news, Swift becomes the first artist to have seven albums each sell at least 500,000 copies in a single week (Fearless, Speak Now, RED, 1989, Reputation, Lover, and Folklore) since Nielsen Music/MRC Data began electronically tracking such things, and she notches the record for most No. 1 debuts for a female artist. In the U.K., Swift is also the first and only female artist in the 21st century to score five No. 1 studio albums.
