Taylor Swift “The Life of a Showgirl” has the second-highest weekly sales tally for any album, ever… after just one day. Per Billboard, Luminate has reported that the album sold 2.7 million copies on Friday.
That breaks her personal record for the most records she’s ever sold in a week — and also anyone else’s, except for Adele’s. The record for the most album sales in one week is held by Adele’s “25,” which sold 3.4 million copies in its first seven days back in 2015. Swift still has six days of sales activity left to try to surpass that mark.
Luminate also reported that “The Life of a Showgirl” set a record for the most vinyl copies sold in a week, with 1.2 million sold right out of the gate.
The record for an entire week was previously also held by Swift, who set it last year by selling 859,000 copies of “The Tortured Poets Department” in its first seven days, something she surpassed by more than 300,000 units in just one day.
Swift’s previous best in terms of overall numbers was also “Tortured Poets.” It launched in 2024 with 2.61 million units for the entire week, and the singer has already topped that in one day.
Of course, these first-day numbers for “Showgirl” include all the pre-orders that were sold over a period of weeks in advance and shipped to arrive in stores and in customers’ mailboxes on Friday.
All these numbers are for the U.S. only, Luminate pointed out.
Numerous variant editions of “The Life of a Showgirl” were sold ahead of time, most of them as limited editions through Swift’s webstore which quickly sold out. Target has the only retail exclusives, and the only ones that are still currently available, with one vinyl variant and three CDs in stores. (The variants differ only in packaging, not in musical content, as all copies contain the same 12 songs.)
Target left about 500 of its stores open past midnight Thursday night for Swifties who wanted to line up for first crack at holding physical copies in their hands.
Luminate is the successor to Soundscan, and any of these record numbers refer to the era since 1991, when Soundscan came on the scene and began offering reliable weekly sales tallies for recordings.
The album will not be Swift’s only No. 1 this week. Her theatrical event “Taylor Swift: The Official Release Party of a Showgirl” is playing for three days only in theaters this weekend and will easily top the box office. Variety reported earlier on Saturday that the theatrical release made $15.8 million just on its first day.