Seventeen years after her debut album, Taylor Swift just had the biggest opening weekend sales of her career. 1989 (Taylor’s Version) debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 chart this weekend with 1.653 million units sold in the U.S. alone. That’s the biggest opening weekend for an album since Adele’s 25 launched with a mind-melting 3.482 million albums sold.
Billboard reports that “of 1989 (Taylor’s Version)’s first-week units, traditional album sales comprise 1.359 million of that sum — Swift’s single-largest sales week for any of her albums. It surpasses her previous high, logged when the original 1989 album debuted with 1.287 million sold.” It’s the first Taylor’s Version to sell more than the original album, this coming a few days after she set the record for the most-streamed Spotify album in a single day.
1989 (Taylor’s Version) also had the sixth-biggest sales week for any album ever, behind the aforementioned Adele album, *NSYNC’s No Strings Attached (2.416 million), *NSYNC’s Celebrity (1.878 million), Eminem’s The Marshall Mathers LP (1.76 million), and Backstreet Boys’ Black & Blue (1.591 million).
Taylor’s Version? More like Taylor’s World.
Swift’s Eras Tour resumes this week in Buenos Aires before hitting Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo to close out the year. The record-setting tour (which is also breaking records at the box office) will return to the U.S. in 2024.