Scale of Taylor Swifts success stuns music industry

Taylor Swift’s latest album was always going to be a hit.

She’s Taylor Swift, first of all. And Midnights, which was released Oct. 21, is her first new pop album since 2019, after an extremely productive couple of years in which she released two indie-folk-style LPs and two rerecorded versions of old records.

Yet even for a superstar like Swift, the scale of her latest success has stunned the music industry.

In its first week out, Midnights had the equivalent of 1,578,000 sales in the United States, according to the tracking service Luminate — the biggest weekly take for any album in seven years, since Adele’s 25 arrived with a boom of nearly 3.5 million (and with the full album then absent from streaming).

On the Hot 100 chart for songs, Swift benefits from her strong streaming numbers, currently occupying every spot in the Top 10, a Billboard first.

Streaming has so rewritten the math of the music business that in recent years it had become practically an article of faith that no record would ever again cross a time-honoured threshold of blockbuster sales: moving more than 1 million copies in a single week, as artists such as ’N Sync, the Backstreet Boys and Eminem did multiple times in the old days.

The last record to hit this mark was Swift’s Reputation, in 2017. Since then, both Swift’s Lover (2019) and Adele’s 30 (2021) failed to reach the magic seven digits.

But Midnights has easily crossed that line, and not only in “equivalent sales,” a composite number used by Luminate and Billboard to reconcile the various ways fans consume music now, counting streaming, sales and track downloads. Of the 1,578,000 “equivalents” for Midnights, 1,140,000 were copies sold as a complete package — in other words, purchases of the album as a whole. It is Swift’s fifth album to sell at least 1 million copies in a single week, and no album by any artist has had better weekly sales since Reputation opened with 1,216,000.

How did she do it?

That is always the question for Swift, who is not only one of the most vital creative forces in 21st-century pop but also perhaps its greatest marketer. In a year of many disappointing releases, with albums by Drake, Post Malone, Kendrick Lamar and other big names posting surprisingly low numbers, Swift promoted her release cleverly online, with cheeky TikTok videos and drip-drip revelations, and advertised an array of product variations that got fans reaching for their credit cards.

“She can create an event record,” said Keith Caulfield, Billboard’s senior director of charts. “She’s done that with Midnights.”

The biggest factor ended up being physical media. Those formats, including CD, vinyl and cassette, now make up just 10% of all recorded music revenue in the United States — streaming is 84% — but they are often embraced by fans eager to own something tangible by their favourite artists, and can play an important role in a new record’s chart position.

The standard CD and LP versions of Midnights came in four forms, with variant artwork, and Target sold additional variations, with lavender-coloured vinyl or three extra tracks on its CD. Swift also sold autographed versions through her website, and three hours after Midnights came out she released an expanded “3am Edition,” with seven extra tracks.

In the most commented-upon gimmick, the back covers of the four vinyl versions, when arranged in a grid, form the numbers of a clock, and, for $49, Swift’s website even sold the parts of a wall clock to bring it all together. “Collect all 4 editions!” Swift’s website said when promoting the releases.

It worked. Midnights sold 575,000 copies on vinyl, along with 395,000 on CD and even 10,000 on cassette. There were also 161,000 copies of the album sold as a digital download.

Collectible CD and vinyl versions are nothing new. K-pop groups such as BTS and Blackpink have been releasing new albums with elaborate CD packaging for years. Two weeks ago, the Red Hot Chili Peppers released an album, Return of the Dream Canteen, in 10 vinyl variations.

Yet Swift’s success with the strategy is as extraordinary as you might expect. Her 575,000 vinyl sales are the most any album has sold on that format since at least 1991, when SoundScan, a predecessor of Luminate, began keeping reliable data on music sales. It is more than three times as many as the previous record, when Harry Styles’ Harry’s House notched 182,000 vinyl copies in May.

The success of Midnights is not just a vinyl or CD phenomenon. It also had 549 million streams, the third-best weekly total for any album. Drake has the two best showings in that metric, with Scorpion (746 million in 2018) and Certified Lover Boy (744 million, 2021). So far this year, the only other album to come close was Bad Bunny’s Un Verano Sin Ti, which opened with 357 million streams in May. (For now, Un Verano is still the year’s biggest album, with the equivalent of 2.9 million sales, largely from streaming.)

Midnights, of course, opened at No. 1 on Billboard’s latest album chart. It is Swift’s 11th album to reach the peak, tying her with Bruce Springsteen, Barbra Streisand and Drake. Only Jay-Z (with 14) and the Beatles (with 19) have had more titles at No. 1.

Also this week, Lil Baby’s It’s Only Me, last week’s chart-topper, falls to No. 2, and Bad Bunny’s Un Verano slips to No. 3 in its 25th week out — its first time dipping lower than second place, including 13 times at No. 1.

Morgan Wallen’s Dangerous: The Double Album, now in its 94th week out — all but one in the Top 10 — holds at No. 4, and The Highlights, a hits compilation by the Weeknd, is No. 5.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.