Another day, a new record for Taylor Swift.
As expected, Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department debuts at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 albums chart (dated May 4). It is their 14th album to reach this plateau, tying Jay-Z for the most No. 1 albums among solo artists. The Beatles have more with 19 No. 1s, but it should be noted that the chart’s methodology for determining sales has changed over time.
The Tortured Poets Department earned 2.61 million equivalent album units in the U.S. for the week ending April 25, with traditional album sales (purchases of digital download albums, CDs, vinyl LPs and cassettes) accounting for 1.914 million of that total. Vinyl accounts for 859,000 vinyl units. The album’s deluxe edition’s collective 31 songs generated 891.34 million official on-demand streams.
The numbers mark the biggest streaming week for an album, the second-biggest week for an album (by total equivalent album units earned) since the Billboard 200 began measuring by units in December 2014, and the third-biggest sales week (by traditional albums). Sales) in modern times (since Luminate began tracking sales electronically in 1991). It is also the largest sales week for an album on vinyl in modern times.
The Billboard 200 chart ranks the week’s most popular albums in the United States based on multi-metric consumption, measured in equivalent album units, compiled by Luminate. Units include album sales, track equivalent albums (TEA) and streaming equivalent albums (SEA).
Each unit represents one album sale, or 10 individual tracks sold from an album, or 3,750 ad-supported or 1,250 paid/subscription-based on-demand audio and video streams generated by songs from an album.
The Tortured Poets Department was released on April 19 at midnight ET as a standard 16-song digital download album. Two hours after the album’s release, Swift announced an expanded 31-song edition of the set and released it as a digital download and streaming album.
Since its release, the album has also topped the UK music charts, recording its highest first week sales in seven years.
Additionally, Tortured Poets Department is the first album in Spotify history to reach more than one billion streams in a single week, and was the most streamed album in a single day, with a reported over 200 million streams.
Swift now has the three most streamed albums in a single day, tying the previous records midnight And 1989 (Taylor’s version).