Taylor Swift Sets Modern Day Sales Record With 34 The Life Of A Showgirl Variants

Taylor Swift’s The Life Of A Showgirl is doing numbers. Upon its arrival last Friday, the pop star’s 12th proper studio album quickly broke the one-day vinyl sales record, and broke the record previously held by Adele’s 25 for biggest listening week. Those numbers, however, included streaming. Now, The Life Of A Showgirl holds the record for the most single-week physical and digital sales in the modern era, Billboard reports. A lot of that might be to do with the 34 variants Swift is selling.

Vinyl variants are nothing new — pre-internet era, a lot of artists sold unique releases in different countries, though those weren’t necessarily sold with collectability in mind. The Life Of A Showgirl, however, has been made available in 27 physical iterations (18 CDs, eight vinyl LPs, and one cassette) and seven download variants (not counting clean and explicit editions for wide digital retail) so far. Of those digital variants, there were four new iTunes Store-exclusive editions of the album that sold for $4.99 each, one per day, each for 24-hours only. All have the same tracklist as the four limited-edition CDs that Swift released in her webstore over the weekend, which each had the album’s 12 songs, plus two unique bonus tracks (acoustic/alternative versions of songs on the album). The iTunes versions also add two unique voice memos to each album.

Yesterday, Swift’s webstore released a limited-edition digital download version of Showgirl dubbed The Life of a Showgirl (So Punk On The Internet Version), with the album’s 12 songs and six previously released voice memos, plus one new voice memo. That one’s not available anymore, though, so sorry to the punks who missed out.

HITS reports that The Life Of A Showgirl has now accrued over 4 million copies in sales, including streaming.