Taylor Swift’s ‘The Life of a Showgirl’ shatters sales and streaming records
Trust the showgirl to break all existing records.
Taylor Swift’s ‘The Life of a Showgirl’ dropped on Friday and it has the second-highest weekly sales tally for any album. Ever. After only one day.
Luminate has reported that Swift’s 12th album sold 2.7 million copies on release day in the US, thereby breaking the singer’s personal record for the most records she’s ever sold in a week. Last year’s ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ launched with 2.6 million units in a week. She’s already topped that in one day.
Only Adele stands in her way of total domination, as the British artist still holds the record for the most album sales in one week for her album ‘25’, which sold 3.4 million copies in its first seven days in 2015.
You can bet that Swift will surpass that figure in the four days left of sales activity.
The final opening week sales will be announced on 12 October.
Luminate also reported that ‘The Life of a Showgirl’ has set the record for the most vinyl copies sold in a week in the US, with 1.2 million. For reference, the record for an entire week was previously held by none other than Swift for ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ last year. She sold 859,000 copies in the first seven days of her 2024 release. Quite the 2025 markup.
Spotify have also confirmed that 'The Life of a Showgirl’ became the most-streamed album on the platform in a single day in 2025 so far, while opening track ‘The Fate Of Ophelia’ was the most-streamed song in a single day in Spotify history on Friday.
As if that wasn’t enough, the pop superstar has announced four limited edition CDs with extra acoustic versions of songs from the album, and her theatrical complement to the album, Taylor Swift: The Official Release Party of a Showgirl, hit $46million globally and took the top spot at the global box office this weekend. The cinematic companion piece only played on the big screen for three days.
Since its release on Friday, Swifties have been flooding social media with their hot takes. It's a mixed bag.
Some are calling ‘The Life of a Showgirl’ “her best album”...
...While others have declared it “the worst Taylor Swift album yet”.
Euronews Culture leans more towards the latter take. Despite a strong opening, the album takes an almighty nosedive after three tracks.
In our review of ‘The Life of a Showgirl’, we wrote: “All hackneyed temptations to attribute this lighter and edgeless album to the fact that Taylor has finally found her happy ending with a romantic relationship that seems to be here to stay should be banished. The line of thought that heartache is creative catalyst and that happiness dulls the wit is proven but platitudinous. That said, maybe she should’ve taken a break before coming back. Not that her work ethic isn't inspiring - and doesn’t seem to be entirely human... Seriously, when does she sleep? However, with playful but uninspired lyrics like “Please God, bring me a best friend who I think is hot”, a sabbatical is needed."
We added: "‘The Life of a Showgirl’ is more concise than ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ and better than 2022’s ‘MIDnights’. But it does feel a bit boilerplate. It certainly doesn’t live up to the (frequently exhausting) fanfare.”
Taylor Swift's 'The Life of a Showgirl' is out now.
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