Prior to last Tuesday, no artist had gone platinum this year, a new low for the music industry given the current fiscal year. Then, Taylor Swift’s fifth studio album 1989 happened and a Nielsen SoundScan shockwave occurred.
The pop star sold 1.287 million copies in her first week, according to Billboard.
Here are some of the achievements Swift has earned with the debut of 1989:
– The largest sales week for an album since June 2, 2002, when Eminem’s The Eminem Show sold 1.322 million in its second chart week at No. 1. The album debuted atop the chart a week earlier, selling 285,000 copies after it was released on a Friday, giving the album only three days of sales in its chart bow.
– Swift is the only act to earn three million-selling weeks with an album. She also racked up million-selling weeks with the debuts of Red (1.208 million) and Speak Now (1.047 million). She was already the only woman to have two million-selling frames. (Her first two albums, 2008’s Fearless and her 2006 self-titled debut, bowed with 592,000 and 39,000, respectively.)
– 1989 is immediately the biggest-selling album released in 2014, and the only one to sell a million in total, after only a week on sale. It jumps ahead of Coldplay’s Ghost Stories, which has sold 745,000.
It may prove to be that kind of year where girls actually run the music world as both Beyonce and Nicki Minaj are also slated to drop new albums this holiday season.
“Industry experts predicted 1989 would sell 650k first week,” she told her followers on Instagram. “You went and bought 1.287 million albums,” before celebrating with Kendrick Lamar’s “Backstreet Freestyle.” The road to going platinum was a White House-level security maneuver for her record label, as they kept one copy in a vaulted safe and had all the songs removed from Spotify.
Check out all the fan recognition of 1989, as well as Kendrick and Taylor paying homage to one another in the gallery below.
How come your favorite rapper can’t do this anymore?
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Photos: Instagram/Taylor Swift
