Taylor Swift continues to set records with her 10th studio album, Midnights, which has smashed a record no one has touched in five years: selling a million copies in a week.
But, Taylor didn’t need a full week to land that milestone. She only needed three days.
For comparison, Adele shook up the music market when releasing 30 back in November 2021, but she only sold 839,000 album units in its first week of release. In addition, Harry Styles’ Harry’s House only sold 521,500 copies in its first week back in May.
Variety reports that not only did Taylor sell 1.2 million copies of Midnights in three days’ time, about half of those sales were vinyl.
The outlet said vinyl-sale tracker Luminate confirmed fans snatched up close to 500,000 LP format versions of Midnights. Taylor can pat herself on the back for making fans want to collect them in the first place by releasing four different colored vinyl versions of the album.
She revealed that each album jacket contained a fourth of a clock face on the back, printed in a curve so fans could hang them on the wall to form an entire clock. She craftily sold the hands of the clock to complete the illusion.
Taylor also sold a fifth LP version of her new album exclusively on Target.
One last thing, the last artist to sell a million units in their first week of release was Taylor herself. She hit the milestone back in 2017 after 1.2 million copies of her Reputation album sold in its first week.
We will find out just how many copies of Midnights sell on Sunday when the charts release their weekly sales results.
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