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Taylor Swift on stage.
Taylor Swift on stage. Photograph: VCG via Getty Images
Taylor Swift on stage. Photograph: VCG via Getty Images

Taylor Swift scores biggest selling US album of 2017 in one week

This article is more than 6 years old

The pop singer-songwriter, who kept new release Reputation off streaming services, has overtaken Ed Sheeran as the year’s biggest seller in the US

Taylor Swift’s Reputation has become the biggest-selling album of the year in the US in a single week, with 1.23m sales. That total comfortably beats the 931,000 copies of ÷ sold by Ed Sheeran since he released it in early March.

Swift has kept all but four songs from Reputation off streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music, meaning that fans need to pay to download the album or buy it on CD if they want to hear it. She also, somewhat controversially, created a promotion where fans who bought multiple copies of the album increased their chances of getting tickets to her upcoming tour, thus further driving sales.

Nielsen, which collates album sales data in the US, said that Reputation sold more copies than the rest of the top 200 albums put together. Swift’s previous three albums have all sold more than a million copies in the US in their first week– a feat increasingly difficult to achieve as the popularity of downloads and CDs continues to wane.

Her label Big Machine reported that a further 905,000 copies were sold worldwide, 84,000 of which were in the UK, which gives it the sixth-largest first week UK sales of the year, behind albums by Sam Smith, Liam Gallagher, Take That, Rag’N’Bone Man and Swift’s friend Ed Sheeran, who sold 671,000 copies of ÷ in the first week of its release.

Swift’s impressive US total is still some way off the all-time first week sales record set by Adele in 2015, when her album 25 sold 3.37m copies in the US in its opening week.

Forbes, meanwhile, has estimated that Swift is the third highest-earning female musician in 2017, dropping from the top spot last year when her earnings were driven by tour revenues from her previous album, 1989. She was estimated to have earned $44m (£33m) this year, below Beyoncé, whose Formation world tour helped generate earnings of $105m (£79m), and Adele, who earned $69m (£52m).

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