The first week numbers for Taylor Swift’s latest album Midnights are in, and they are absolutely staggering.
Her tenth studio album amassed 1.578 million equivalent album units, the largest single week on the Billboard 200 in nearly seven years. Of that sum, 1.140 million consisted of album sales, and 419,000 was comprised of SEA units, equaling 549.26 million on-demand streams of the tracks. The remaining 19,000 came by way of TEA units.
Midnights exceeded early projections, which had her latest offering earning somewhere between 1 million and 1.2 million units. It’s likely the album received an additional push from its 3AM edition, which featured seven additional tracks that weren’t available on physical copies.
A closer look at the first week figures shows Midnights moved 980,000 units in physical sales. That figure can be broken down into 575,000 on vinyl, 395,000 for CD copies and 10,000 on cassette. Even digital album downloads totaled 161,000 units. Midnights also broke the single-week vinyl sales record, which was previously held by Harry’s House with 182,000.
It’s her 11th No. 1 album, tying her with Barbara Streisand for the most among female artists. Swift entered rarefied air as one of only six acts to reach the top spot on the Billboard 200 more than 10 times, joining The Beatles (19), Jay-Z (14), Drake (11), Bruce Springsteen (11), and the aforementioned Streisand.
Swift appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon this past week where she revealed Midnights is her “first directly autobiographical album in a while.”
“It’s actually, it’s a concept record, but it’s my first directly autobiographical album in a while because the last album that I put out was a re-record of my album Red,” she said. “So that has some space, you know. I wrote that stuff a decade ago. Folklore and Evermore, it was like story time. It was mythology.”
Other albums in the top 10 included projects from YoungBoy Never Broke Again, as well as Jeezy and DJ Drama’s SNOFALL.