Taylor Swift’s The Life Of A Showgirl Debuts With 4 Million Sales, Occupies Entire Hot 100 Top 10

Though our own Tom Breihan thought it was solid, a lot of people (myself included) think The Life Of A Showgirl is some of Taylor Swift’s most mediocre work to date. Nonetheless, the mixed public reception has done nothing to slow down the Taylor Swift commercial behemoth.

Swift had the best opening week of her career — indeed, the best sales week for any album ever. A few days ago we learned she’d broken the one-week record, surpassing the mark set by Adele’s 25 back in 2015, in part by releasing at least 34 variants of The Life Of A Showgirl. Now we have the final numbers.

As Billboard reports, Showgirl wrapped up its first week with 4.002 million equivalent album units, including 3,479,500 in pure album sales. Those numbers beat Adele’s records of 3.482 million units and 3.378 million in pure album sales. The rest of Swift’s first-week sales are accounted for by streaming: 522,600 equivalent album units derived from 680.9 million on-demand track streams. No tracks were made available for individual purchase, making Showgirl the first the album to hit #1 without track equivalent units bolstering its total since Billboard started factoring individual track sales into the Billboard 200.

Streaming may have accounted for a relatively small portion of the album’s big debut, but 680.9 million track streams is an enormous figure — enough to gift Swift a monopoly on the Hot 100 top 10 and then some. Billboard confirmed today that Showgirl’s 12 tracks occupy the top 12 spots on the chart, which factors in track sales (not applicable here), radio play, and streaming. It’s the first album ever to place all its songs uninterrupted from the top of the chart on down. Nine of the songs boasted one-week streaming totals higher than the year’s previous one-week streaming record, set by Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us” around the Super Bowl.

This is the third time Swift has taken up the whole top 10, and she remains the only artist to do it. She now boasts 69 top 10 hits, the most among women. Only Drake has more, with 81. Opening track and lead single “The Fate Of Ophelia” gets the #1 debut, giving Swift 13 career Hot 100 chart-toppers — tied with Drake and Michael Jackson for fourth-most all-time. Standing ahead of her are Rihanna (14), Mariah Carey (19), and the Beatles (20). “Ophelia” is Swift’s eighth hit to debut at #1. Here’s where each of the new album’s tracks placed on the chart:

1. “The Fate Of Ophelia”
2. “Opalite”
3. “Elizabeth Taylor”
4. “Father Figure”
5. “Wood”
6. “Wi$h Li$t”
7. “Actually Romantic”
8. “The Life Of A Showgirl” (Feat. Sabrina Carpenter)
9. “Eldest Daughter”
10. “Cancelled!”
11. “Ruin The Friendship”
12. “Honey”

TL;DR Swift remains enormously, historically popular — or at the very least her fans work even harder than she does. In other Swift news, she announced a Disney+ docuseries and concert film today.