Taylor Swift Smashes Another Record With ‘Showgirl’

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The Charts

The pop superstar sold four million copies of her latest album, topping a decade-old milestone by Adele. The tally included 1.3 million vinyl LPs.

Taylor Swift singing while holding a purple spangly microphone; she leans back and points one finger on her other hand.
Credit...Michael Tran/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Ben Sisario

Oct. 13, 2025, 2:09 p.m. ET

By the middle of last week, Taylor Swift had already broken another music industry record, with opening-week sales of her latest album, “The Life of a Showgirl,” eclipsing those of Adele’s “25” from a decade ago. The only question was how much higher those numbers would climb by the end of the week.

The answer: really, really high, to a level that further widens the gulf between Swift’s commercial performance and that of any other contemporary musician.

“The Life of a Showgirl” ended the week with the equivalent of 4,002,000 sales in the United States, according to the tracking service Luminate. In 2015, Adele’s “25” sold 3,482,000 copies out of the gate, a total unsurpassed for a decade. Now there is a daunting new Everest in the music world.

“Showgirl” has become Swift’s 15th album to go to No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart, Billboard magazine announced on Monday. Only the Beatles have more No. 1 titles, with 19.

Swift fever was stoked by her Eras Tour, which wrapped up last year as by far the highest-grossing concert tour on record, selling just over $2 billion in tickets for 149 shows. On Monday, Swift announced two tour-related projects that would be coming to Disney+: “The End of an Era,” a six-episode docuseries about the development and “inner workings” of the tour, with two episodes released per week, starting on Dec. 12, and “The Final Show,” a concert film of the last date of the tour, in Vancouver, B.C., also arriving on Dec. 12.

The equivalent sales figure attributed to “Showgirl” is a composite that incorporates the album’s popularity on streaming services along with purchases of the full album. A breakdown of those numbers illustrates how thoroughly Swift has dominated every format available to her.

The album sold 3,479,500 copies as a complete package on CD, vinyl LPs, downloads and even cassette. In the age of streaming, crossing a million sales at all has become a rare accomplishment: So far this year, the biggest non-Taylor Swift tally for traditional sales is the Weeknd’s “Hurry Up Tomorrow,” with a bit more than 500,000. Moving a million in a single week is a feat achievable by a vanishing few. Other than Swift or Adele, the last artist to do it was Lady Gaga, who sold 1,108,000 copies of “Born This Way” in May 2011 — just before Spotify arrived in the United States.

“Showgirl” sold an astonishing 1,334,000 copies last week as a vinyl LP, breaking a modern-era record for first-week sales set by Swift herself just last year, when she sold 859,000 vinyl copies of “The Tortured Poets Department.”

As has become her signature in recent years, Swift sold multiple editions of her album. By week’s end there were 38 in all, according to Billboard, including 27 physical iterations (18 CD versions, eight vinyl LPs and one cassette). There were also 11 downloadable versions, which sold for as little as $4.99 and came with bonus goodies like acoustic tracks and excerpts from Swift’s “voice memo” recording drafts.

The songs on “Showgirl” also drew 681 million clicks on streaming services from listeners in the United States. Spotify announced that “The Fate of Ophelia,” the opening track on the album, had become the most-streamed song on that platform in a single week.

Swift revealed “Showgirl” in August during an appearance on the podcast “New Heights,” hosted by her fiancé, Travis Kelce, and his brother, Jason, who are football stars. Her promotional push included multiple interviews during its release week and “The Official Release Party of a Showgirl,” an 89-minute presentation at hundreds of AMC movie theaters, which sold $33 million in tickets in the United States and Canada in the album’s opening weekend.

Reaction to the album, from both critics and fans, has been mixed, including some sharp reviews and a flurry of social media posts criticizing, among other things, Swift’s ribald lyrics.

In a video interview with Zane Lowe of Apple Music, Swift said she welcomed the “chaos” from listeners and added: “The rule of show business is: If it’s the first week of my album release and you are saying either my name or my album title, you’re helping.”

Ben Sisario, a reporter covering music and the music industry, has been writing for The Times for more than 20 years.

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