It’s official. Taylor Swift’s 1989 sold a ton of copies during its first week in stores and online. Fueled by the smash hits “Shake It Off” and “Welcome to New York,” the album scored the best sales week for a single album since 2002.
Nielsen SoundScan data provided to Billboard confirmed what many analysts had been predicting over the course of the week. 1989 sold 1.287 million copies during the week ending on Nov. 2.
It is Swift’s fourth No. 1 album, as FearlesS, Speak Now and Red all hit No. 1 as well.
This is the best sales week for a single album since Eminem’s The Eminem Show sold 1.322 million copies in its second week in June 2002. (That album was released on a Friday, selling 285,000 copies in its first day and debuting at No. 1 on the previous week’s chart.)
Amazingly, Swift is the first act to ever score three million-selling weeks with albums. Red and Speak Now also debuted with over 1 million copies sold.
As a sign of just how terrible the music business is, 1989 is already the second-best selling album of 2014 and the best-selling album released in 2014. The current best-selling album is the Frozen soundtrack, which was actually released in November 2013. Frozen has sold 3.5 million copies since January 2014.
Swift’s album is currently missing from Spotify, as is her entire catalog. It’s not clear why she did that, but it does come as her record label, Big Machine, is reportedly up for sale.
The singer is also heading out on tour for the album, starting in May.
image courtesy of Roger Wong/INFphoto.com
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