When Adele’s album “25” came out 10 years ago — featuring the hit “Hello” — it sold nearly 3.5 million copies out of the gate, breaking longstanding opening-week sales numbers. An astonished music industry assumed that in the new age of streaming, no album could ever top it.
Then came Taylor Swift.
“The Life of a Showgirl,” which came out Friday, has now surpassed Adele’s decade-old record. According to initial sales reports collected by the tracking firm Luminate, and reported to Billboard, “Showgirl” has logged the equivalent of at least 3.5 million sales in the United States in its first five days on sale, and it still has two days to go before the opening-week sales period ends on Thursday.
The success comes even as Swift navigates a mixed reaction to “Showgirl.” For an artist accustomed to receiving heavy helpings of praise from critics and fans, the responses have been all over the map, including some notably harsh reviews — Pitchfork gave it 5.9 out of 10, The Guardian two stars out of five — and many disappointed hot takes on social media among the usual hosannas.
“I welcome the chaos,” Swift said of the reactions in a video interview with Zane Lowe of Apple Music. “I’m not the art police,” she added.
The rollout for “Showgirl” included an 89-minute “release party” in movie theaters over the weekend, which featured the premiere of a music video and behind-the-scenes segments that some critics compared to DVD extras. It drew $33 million at box offices in the United States and Canada, clobbering the total for the “The Smashing Machine,” the latest picture from the action star the Rock.
The math behind Swift’s victory shows how physical media formats like CDs and vinyl LPs remain key to the success of top albums even now, when streaming accounts for about 82 percent of revenues from recorded music sales in the United States, and services like Spotify and Apple Music have become the default listening platforms for most fans.
The 3.5 million sales tally is an “equivalent,” or composite number, used by Luminate and Billboard to reconcile streaming popularity with purchases of individual tracks and of the album as a complete package. Of those 3.5 million equivalent sales, about 3.2 million were “traditional sales,” or purchases of the full album, with 2.7 million logged on the first day of release. That means that many of those purchases — perhaps most — were made in advance. Swift issued no singles for “Showgirl” before its full release.
The remaining 300,000 equivalent sales for Swift’s new album in its opening week are attributed to streaming activity, according to Luminate and Billboard.
Its tally so far includes 1.2 million copies sold on vinyl, beating Swift’s own previous record of 859,000 last year for “The Tortured Poets Department.” Swift’s vinyl numbers have shot up dramatically in recent years. When she released “Midnights” in 2022, it opened with 575,000 copies on that format; “1989 (Taylor’s Version),” the following year, did 693,000.
In 2006, when Swift began her recording career, the American music industry logged only about 900,000 vinyl LP sales for the entire year, according to data from the Recording Industry Association of America.
As with Swift’s other recent releases, album sales for “Showgirl” were helped by their availability in a portfolio of “variants” and special editions, including special cover art, multiple colors of vinyl and packages released through Swift’s website for a limited time.
According to Billboard, “Showgirl” was released in at least 27 different configurations on physical formats — vinyl, CD and even cassette — including four that were released in the last few days. For a limited time, Swift sold a $70 package that included a “TS”-branded cardigan, in “Showgirl”-style glittery orange, with a CD in a box.
The final first-week sales numbers for “Showgirl” are expected to be announced early next week.