Taylor Swift’s folklore is now this year’s best-selling album.
Per Billboard, Swift set the bar this week with her eighth studio album, which not only topped the Billboard 200 albums chart — becoming her seventh effort to do so — but scored the biggest week for any album in the United States.
Continuing her streak following 2019’s Lover, folklore sold 846,000 album units in the U.S. in its first week, making it the best-selling album of the year to date. Swift’s latest achievement bests previous title holder, the late rapper Juice WRLD, whose posthumous LP Legends Never Die premiered to approximately 500,000 units sold in its first week.
(For context, Lover had the biggest debut of any album last year with 867,000 equivalent album units. Before that, Swift’s Reputation had held the title since 2017.)
Additionally, per the “Cardigan” singer’s record label, Universal Music Group, folklore sold over 2 million copies worldwide and garnered more than half a billion streams on audio and video in total in just a single week.
That’s not the last of Swift’s accomplishments with folklore, which earned the pop star the most No. 1 debuts for any female artist. Thanks to the success of her new project, she’s also the first act to have seven albums to each sell at least 500,000 units in a single week, including Fearless, Speak Now, RED, 1989, Reputation, Lover, and Folklore.
[Elvis Duran]
