What Does Taylor Swift Have In Common With Britney Spears And Eminem?
It used to be that superstar artists regularly went platinum, selling more than a million copies of an album. In the day and age of digital streaming services like Spotify, however, fans are simply not buying as many CDs as they once did.
So the news that Taylor Swift's new CD Red has not only sold over a million (1.208 million to be exact, according to Nielsen SoundScan), but done so in just one week, is no less than astounding. (Red, by the way, is not currently available on Spotify.)
That is the highest single-week sales figure in ten years. To find a bigger number, you have to back to 2002, when Eminem's album The Eminem Show sold 1.322 million copies during its first week.
Congrats to @taylorswift13 for selling 1.2 million albums in a week, orrrrsssuuummmm
— Ed Sheeran (@edsheeran) October 31, 2012
The most recent album to sell a over a million during its debut week is Born This Way by Lady Gaga, which topped out at 1.108 million when it was released in May of last year.
Taylor's first-week sales figure is the second highest for a female artist. According to Billboard, the top spot belongs to Britney Spears, whose Oops! . . . I Did It Again sold 1.319 million in 2000.
The Red sales figure includes both physical and digital copies. Billboard reports that 465,000 of those albums sold were on iTunes. Another 396,000, Billboard says, were sold by Target, which has an exclusive deal to market a "deluxe" version of Red that includes six additional songs.
Red also topped the Billboard 200 album chart this week, and it is expected to do so again in its second week.
- Kurt Wolff, CBS Local
