Taylor Swift has broken the first-week, equivalent-unit sales record long held by Adele for her 2015 album 25, making The Life of a Showgirl the fastest-selling-and-streaming album of the modern era, Billboard reports. Since its release on Friday, October 3, Showgirl has already hit 3.5 million equivalent unit sales—some 20,000 more than 25 amassed in its first week—according to initial reports from the data tracking firm Luminate. Adele still holds the record for actual albums sold, a metric that includes physical and digital sales but not streams; 25 racked up 3.378 million to The Life of a Showgirl’s 3.2 million. Swift, of course, still has two days of sales to go.
The Life of a Showgirl’s mammoth numbers include 1.2 million vinyl copies sold, a record of its own, surpassing the 859,000 tally achieved by The Tortured Poets Department. Billboard and Luminate calculate equivalent unit sales by adding streaming figures—in this case amounting to some 300,000 unit sales—to the traditional sales figures. As is customary for Taylor Swift albums, The Life of a Showgirl was available from her webstore in multiple limited-edition and limited-time variants, encouraging superfans to buy multiple copies. Billboard will announce the final sales figures on Sunday.
Read Pitchfork’s track reviews of “Actually Romantic” and “Father Figure.”
