Taylor Swift’s latest album, ‘Reputation,’ has sold over 1.2 million copies within its first week, bringing her into the top ten of artists to do so. This is her second album to reach such high marks after 1989 debuted to similar sales of 1.286 million.
This is the fifth time that Taylor has released an album that hit the number one spot on the Billboard 200 albums chart. She is the first artist to have a fourth million-selling week, and Reputation also has an incredibly high number of hard copy CDs sold, at 507,000 so far. That’s the highest number of hard copy sales in a week since Adele’s 25, which sold 1.03 million copies during the week following its release in 2015.
The artists with other all-time first week highs include Adele with 25, *NSYNC with No Strings Attached and Celebrity, Eminem with The Marshall Mathers LP and The Eminem Show, the Backstreet Boys with Black & Blue, Britney Spears with Oops!…I Did It Again, and The Beatles with 1.
Reputation is Swift’s sixth studio album and it has a bit of a different vibe. Whereas Taylor usually fills her album with breakup jams based on her real-life romances, on this one she seems to be happily in love. And then there are of course the references to Kanye West, one star who she’s had a long-standing beef with.
Kanye is obviously referenced in both “Look What You Made Me Do” as well as “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things.”
“Feeling so Gatsby for that whole year…Friends don’t try to trick you / Get you on the phone / And mind-twist you.”
The lyrics are discussing an incident where Kim Kardashian and Kanye West taped a phone call with Taylor to have proof that she offered permission to be discussed in his song. After Kanye’s song came out Taylor said she didn’t give permission, at which point the phone call was leaked. Clearly, there’s some back and forth with those two and fans continue to eat it up.