Taylor Swift’s latest album, The Life of a Showgirl, has already secured the UK’s biggest opening week of 2025, after selling 304,000 copies since Friday.
The total eclipses the first-week sales of her last two studio albums: 2024’s The Tortured Poets Departent (270,000 copies) and 2022’s Midnights (204,000).
With just three days counted, she has achieved the UK’s biggest first-week sales since Ed Sheeran’s Divide sold 672,000 copies in 2017.
The star is also on track to have the biggest-selling album of the year overall. The current title holder is Sabrina Carpenter, who appears on Life of a Showgirl’s title track. Her Short N’ Sweet album has shifted 444,000 copies since January.
Swift has also broken records in the US, where she notched up 2.7 million sales on Friday alone.
That marks Swift’s biggest sales week ever, and the second-largest sales week for any album since 1991, when modern chart methodology began.
Only Adele’s 25 has done better – selling 3.378 million copies in its first week in 2015.
The Life of a Showgirl has also smashed the US record for the most vinyl albums sold in a single week.
Swifties snapped up 1.2 million copies on wax – at least in part because the star released eight collectable variants of the record.
The previous single-week record was also set by Swift when her last album, The Tortured Poets Department, sold 859,000 copies on vinyl in its first week.
Swift’s sales figures are all the more impressive because album sales elsewhere in the industry are in a state of perpetual decline.
In the UK, only one other album has shifted more than 100,000 copies in a week this year – Sam Fender’s People Watching.
Ed Sheeran’s latest, Play, sold 67,000 units when it came out last month.
During the summer, two albums (Reneé Rapp’s Bite Me and the Oasis compilation Time Flies) topped the charts with fewer than 20,000 sales.
Not content with chart domination, however, Swift topped the cinema box office this weekend, selling $46m (£34m) in tickets for her 89-minute film Taylor Swift: The Official Release Party Of A Showgirl.
Essentially an album launch event, the screenings included the premiere of her music video for The Fate Of Ophelia, behind-the-scenes footage from the making of the album, and Swift’s commentary on the songs.
Mixed reviews
Swift’s 12th album was written and recorded during stolen moments on the European leg of her Eras Tour last summer.
It captures the star as she falls in love with American Footballer Travis Kelce; interspersed with cautionary – and sometimes catty – tales about the music industry.
Critical reviews have been mixed. Variety magazine called it “contagiously joyful” while the Financial Times said it “lacked sparkle”.
Speaking on BBC Radio 2’s Breakfast Show with Scott Mills, the star debunked rumours that it would be her last album.
Asked if she planned to retire for a life of domestic bliss, as some fans have suggested, the singer laughed: “That’s a shockingly offensive thing to say.
“It’s not why people get married – so that they can quit their job.”
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