Taylor Swift's Red Sold 1,208,000 Copies in its First Week

Afrik Update

Entertainment

By Paul Grein/Chartwatch

             

Taylor Swift's Red sold 1,208,000 copies in its first week, the greatest one-week total since Eminem's The Eminem Show sold 1,322,000 in its first full week in June 2002.

The tally for Red is up from the 1,047,000 that Swift's previous album,Speak Now, sold in its first week in October 2010. And that was up from the 592K copies that her sophomore album, Fearless, sold its first week in November 2008. And that was way up from the 39K that her first album, Taylor Swift, sold in its first week in October 2006.

Swift is one of only four artists to ring up first-week sales of 1 million or more copies more than once. The others are Backstreet Boys,*NSYNC and Eminem. This makes Swift the first female artist and the first country artist to achieve this feat. And she's just the second artist, following Backstreet Boys, to see its sales increase from its first million-selling first-week to its second. Details below.

The tally for Red includes 465K digital copies, which constitutes the second-highest digital total in history. Lady Gaga's Born This Waysold 662K digital copies in its first week in May 2011. And that total included about 400K copies that sold for 99 cents at Amazon MP3. (Gaga fans wish I'd stop bringing that up, but it is a pretty significant asterisk.)Mumford & Sons' Babel sold 420K digital copies in its first week in September, which is now the third highest one-week tally.

Red becomes Swift's third #1 album on The Billboard 200. Swift is only the third female artist in country music history to notch three #1 albums. She follows Faith Hill, who scored with Breathe, Cry and Fireflies, and Carrie Underwood, who scored with Carnival Ride, Play On and Blown Away. (Hill, of course, is married to Tim McGraw, the subject of Swift's first hit on both the Hot 100 and Hot Country Songs, "Tim McGraw.")

Swift is one of four artists to have the year's fastest-breaking new album two or more times since 1992, the first full year that Nielsen SoundScan tracked sales for Billboard. Garth Brooks had the fastest-breaking album four times in the 1990s. *NSYNC and 50 Cent each had it twice.

Red is already the third-best selling album of 2012. It trails only Adele's 21 (4,114,000 sold so far this year) and One Direction's Up All Night (1,316,000). I figure Red will wind up #2 for the year. That would make this the fourth year that Swift has had one of the three best-selling albums of the year. Fearless was #3 for 2008 and #1 for 2009. Speak Now was #3 for 2010.

That would also make Swift only the second artist, following Eminem, to rank in the top three at year's end four times since 1991. The Marshall Mathers LP was #2 for 2000. The Eminem Show was #1 for 2002.Encore was #3 for 2004. Recovery was #1 for 2010.

Red also debuts at #1 in the U.K. It's Swift's first #1 album in the U.K.