Taylor Swift breaks Adele’s streaming-era record with ‘The Life Of A Showgirl’
It was bound to happen and now, Taylor Swift has made history with her latest studio album.
As we reported on Monday, ‘The Life of a Showgirl’ had already broken all records, selling 2.7 million copies in 24 hours 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 topped that in just one day and her 12th album had the second-highest weekly sales tally for any album ever.
Now, Taylor Swift has broken Adele’s streaming-era record, with ‘Life of a Showgirl’ selling 3.5 million units in the US alone, eclipsing the British artist’s record of most album sales in one week for her album ‘25’ - which sold 3.4 million copies in its first seven days in December 2015.
According to Luminate, Swift’s latest record-break is a combination of 3.2 million copies of the album and 300,000 units from streaming.
It only took Swift five days to break the record, which means her final first-week sales will be much higher.
'The Life of a Showgirl' has received mixed reviews - “her best album” for some, “the worst Taylor Swift album yet” for others - and has also been met with backlash regarding the album rollout and the potential use of AI in promo videos.
In a recent interview, Swift addressed the criticism.
“I welcome the chaos. The rule of show business is if it’s the first week of my album release and you are saying either my name or my album title, you’re helping,” she said on Apple Music’s The Zane Lowe Show. “And art, I have a lot of respect for people’s subjective opinions on art. I’m not the art police. It’s like everybody is allowed to feel exactly how they want. And what our goal is as entertainers is to be a mirror.”
She continued: “What I often love seeing my fans say is ‘I used to be someone who didn’t like relate to Reputation, and now that I’ve been through some other things in my life, that’s my favourite album.’ Or ‘I used to be a Fearless girlie, now I’m obsessed with Evermore.’ I’m playing for keeps.”
“I have such an eye on legacy when I’m making my music – I know what I made, I know I adore it. I know that on the theme of what the ‘Showgirl’ is, all of this is part of it,” she concluded.
In our review of ‘The Life of a Showgirl’, published last Friday, we wrote: “It’s early listening days yet, but after several spins, it’s clear that all 12 songs are competently orchestrated, smoothly delivered, and feature occasional Carpenter raunchiness - especially on the track ‘Wood’ and its priapic lexical field. That said, something’s missing."
We continued: "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. (...) ‘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.”
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