DENVER, COLORADO – JULY 14: EDITORIAL USE ONLY Taylor Swift performs onstage during “Taylor Swift | … [+]
Taylor Swift claims the top spot on the Billboard 200 albums chart this week with her highly-anticipated release, Speak Now (Taylor’s Version). The full-length, which is a re-recorded version of her earlier work Speak Now, debut in first place with a massive starting sum, once again solidifying Swift’s reign as one of the most successful artists of our time.
Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) marks Swift’s twelfth No. 1 album on the chart, a number very few artists have reached in the half-century-long tenure of the tally. Her last album, Midnights, also opened in first place less than a year ago, amassing over one million equivalent units in its first frame.
The album arrives with a staggering 716,000 equivalent album units. Out of that number, an impressive 507,000 units come from actual sales, indicating the incredible demand for Swift’s music.
In addition to more than half a million purchases, the album generated an astounding 206,000 streaming equivalent album units, fueled by over 269.33 million streams of the 22 songs featured on the record. This is the third-largest streaming week for any album in the United States in 2023.
Swifties also contributed to the album’s success through individual track purchases. Those fans who only purchased a handful of tracks at a time ended up adding another 3,000 track equivalent units to the title’s first-week total.
Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) also performed exceptionally well on the vinyl format, with 268,500 copies of the album sold. For a format that was nearly dead just a decade ago, selling more than a quarter of a million copies in seven days is truly astounding.
Swift’s massive sales and streaming numbers left other artists far behind, and she didn’t face any real competition this time around. This week’s runner-up, Morgan Wallen’s One Thing at a Time, only moved an additional 104,000 equivalent copies. Swift’s album outsold Wallen’s by more than six and a half times over.
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/hughmcintyre/2023/07/16/taylor-swift-charts-her-twelfth-no-1-album-with-the-massive-speak-now-taylors-version/