Taylor Swift Still Tops the Charts

Taylor Swift

Variety:

One month after its release, Taylor Swift’s “The Life of a Showgirl” logs a major milestone as it hits a fn uninterrupted four weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200.

The set is just the second album of 2025 to spend its first four weeks at the summit, following Morgan Wallen’s “I’m the Problem,” which led for its first eight weeks (and 12 weeks overall). Not surprisingly, Swift’s fourth week numbers are significant; she has earned a total of 146,000 album units in the United States in the week ending Oct. 30, according to Luminate.

My Life In 35 Songs, Track 32: “evermore” by Taylor Swift

My Life in 35 Songs

Hey December, guess I’m feeling unmoored; can’t remember what I used to fight for

In competitive running, they call it hitting the wall: the moment near the end of a race, usually a long, arduous one, where all the fight goes out of you. Your legs feel like lead, your heart is hammering on overdrive, your lungs are screaming at you to stop, and your mind is sounding every alarm bell it knows how to hit, all in a desperate attempt to override any motivation, goals, or positive self-talk you have left. Suddenly, everything inside of you is screaming the same word at maximum volume: quit, quit, QUIT.

When Taylor Swift released evermore, her second surprise album of 2020, on Friday the 13th of that December, I felt like a man who had hit the wall – not in my ability to run a race, but in my ability to weather a particularly fraught chapter in human history. When the sun rose that morning, it marked nine months to the day since the year’s other Friday the 13th – the March day when the world had turned upside down in the face of the incoming COVID-19 pandemic. And, for my part, I wasn’t sure if I could take any more months.

Writing about evermore on my favorite albums of 2020 list (it came in at number 3), I wrote that it “dropped on a chilly December Friday that just so happened to be the end of one of the worst weeks of my life.” At the time, I did not elaborate. I felt like everyone’s lives were in disarray, and I thought the sentiment would be more relatable if I didn’t tell my full story of why Taylor Swift’s saddest album came to mean so much to me as 2020 drew to its (merciful) conclusion. After all, who couldn’t relate to feeling down about a Christmas season where the very things that make the holidays special – namely, the warmth of togetherness with family and friends – were going to be all but impossible?

Five years later, I’m ready to share what happened that week, and that year, and how it tore my family apart, changed my entire life, and reframed my whole damn worldview. And I’m ready to tell that story because every time I listen to evermore, particularly the beautifully, exhaustedly sad title track, I can’t help but flash back to where I was the first time I heard it.

Read More “My Life In 35 Songs, Track 32: “evermore” by Taylor Swift”

Taylor Swift Still Tops Charts

Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift still has the number one album:

Taylor Swift’s “The Life of a Showgirl” era continues as the record notches a third straight week at No. 1 with 194,000 equivalent album units earned, according to Luminate. The 12-song record shows no signs of slowing down — it’s only the second album of 2025 to spend its first three weeks atop the chart, following Morgan Wallen’s “I’m the Problem,” which held the position for first eight weeks.

Taylor Swift Breaks More Records

Taylor Swift

Billboard:

According to initial reports to data tracking firm Luminate, the tracks on The Life of a Showgirl have generated more than 460 million on-demand official streams in the United States since the album’s release on Oct. 3. There are multiple versions of album on streaming services: a standard 12-song edition, a track-by-track commentary edition that includes the 12 songs plus commentary tracks from Swift, and a track-by-track commentary edition that has Swift’s commentary and lyric videos for each of the songs. […] The sales continue to come in to Luminate for The Life of a Showgirl and it may soon topple Adele’s longstanding record for the largest sales week for an album in the modern era. Adele’s 25 debuted with 3.378 million copies sold in its first week in 2015 — the biggest sales week for any album since Luminate began tracking data in 1991 (when the modern era of music sales tabulation began).

The Queen of Selling

Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift’s new album brought in over $33 million at the box office and 2.7 million day-one album sales.

Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl launch has shown once again that it’s Taylor’s world and the rest of us are just living in it. The special album release event dwarfed the competition at the box office over the weekend, debuting to an impressive $33 million domestic and $13 million overseas. That’s a record-breaking number for what is neither a concert film nor a documentary, but a timed promotional event for the release of her new album.

The album dropped on Friday and is already setting records. After just one day, The Life of a Showgirl has secured the second-highest weekly sales for any album since tracking of such things began in the early 1990s. Billboard’s Luminate reported that the album sold 2.7 million copies on Friday alone.