American singer Taylor Swift‘s new album, called ‘Tortured Poets Department’ makes a historic debut at number 1 on the Billboard 200 sales chart, breaking music records as one of the artists with the most albums on the chart, second only to The Beatles.
The set launches with the biggest streaming week ever for an album and marks her 14th No. 1, tying her for the most among solo artists.
Taylor Swift continues to be a phenomenon
Those astounding numbers mark the biggest album streaming week in history, the second biggest week for an album (by total album equivalent units earned) since the Billboard 200 began measuring by units in December 2014, the third biggest sales week (by traditional album sales) in the modern era (since Luminate began tracking sales electronically in 1991) and the biggest sales week for a vinyl album in the modern era.
The Billboard 200 chart ranks the most popular albums of the week in the US according to multi-metric consumption measured in equivalent album units, compiled by Luminate. Units comprise album sales, track equivalent albums (TEA) and streaming equivalent albums (SEA).
Each unit is equivalent to the sale of an album, or 10 individual tracks sold from an album, or 3,750 official audio and video on-demand streams with advertising, or 1,250 paid/subscriptions generated by songs from an album. The new chart dated 4 May 2024 will be published in full on Billboard’s website on 30 April.
Of The Tortured Poets Department’s first week unit total of 2.61 million, album sales comprise 1.9 billion (a figure bolstered by its availability in over 20 different versions of the album), SEA units comprise 683,000 (which equates to 891.37 million official on-demand streams) of the set’s 31 songs, in its deluxe edition) and TEA units total 14,000 (All figures are rounded).
With 1.9 billion sold, The Tortured Poets Department instantly becomes the best-selling album of 2024 so far this year. The second best-selling album, counting weekly sales from January to the present, is Beyonce‘s Cowboy Carter, with 228,000 copies sold in total.
Swift announced the album during the Grammy Awards on 4 February and her official web shop began accepting pre-orders for the project the same day. The set was released on 19 April, along with its first single, “Fortnight”, featuring Post Malone.
The Tortured Poets Department (abbreviated as TTPD) was initially released at midnight ET on April 19 as a standard 16-song digital download album, as well as a variety of 17-song physical configurations (more details on the different versions later in this story.)