Taylor Swift has secured her seventh number one album in the US.
The ‘cardigan’ singer’s surprise studio album, ‘folklore’, topped the charts in the United States, earning 846,000 equivalent album units in the week ending July 30, data from Nielsen Music/MRC has revealed.
And it has also been noted as the largest debut week for an album since her own release in 2019, where ‘Lover’ debuted with 867,000 units.
Her two albums are only beaten by another of her own – ‘reputation’, which was unveiled in 2017 and sold 1.24 million units.
For her album ‘folklore’, 615,000 of these units were for full album sales, whilst 289.85 million streams of the tracks on the album converted to 218,000 in SEA units, plus 13,000 in TEA units.
Only a week in and Taylor’s new album is already 2020’s top selling album, bigger than BTS’ ‘Map of the Soul: 7’, which sold 574,000 since February.
Meanwhile, Taylor also had a great week in the UK too, becoming the first and only female artist in the 21st century to score five number one studio albums in the UK, after her new record ‘folklore’ topped the charts.
Taylor dominated the Singles Chart too, with three of her album’s tracks making it into the top 10 – ‘cardigan’ at number six, her Bon Iver collaboration ‘exile’ at number eight, and ‘the 1’ at number 10.
Current chart rules prevent an artist from charting more than three songs as a lead artist, but without those rules in place, tracks from ‘folklore’ would have also made it to numbers 13, 15, 18, 21, 24, 31, 36, 37, 40, 42, 45 and 51.
Taylor had recently revealed she didn’t tell her friends she was making the LP.
During a fan Q&A, she explained: "No one knew I was making an album. I didn’t even tell my friends until right before the announcement. It was my own secret world I’d go to and I’ve never made music like that before."