Taylor Swift’s ‘The Life Of A Showgirl’ has broken Spotify records and sold 2.7million copies within the first 24 hours of its release.
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The pop giant’s 12th studio record was released on Friday (October 3), the follow-up to 2024’s ‘The Tortured Poets Department’, and it has not taken long for the album to make its impact felt.
Billboard have reported the album sold 2.7million copies in the US in traditional album sales across both physical and digital purchases on its first day of release.
That already makes it the biggest week of sales in Swift’s career after just one day and the second-largest sales week for any album since the company Luminate began tracking the data in 1991 – only the opening week of Adele’s ‘25’ in 2015 registered higher numbers, selling 3.4million copies.
The final opening week sales will be announced on October 12.
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‘The Life Of A Showgirl’ takes the record for the most vinyl copies of an album sold in a single week in the US at 1.2million, breaking her own record set by ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ in 2024 with 859,000.
Assuming it takes the top spot on the Billboard 200 Albums Chart, it will be Swift’s 15th Number One album, putting her ahead of Drake and Jay-Z at second in the all-time list, behind only The Beatles with 19.
Spotify have also confirmed that the album became the most-streamed album on the platform in a single day in 2025 so far (beating Playboi Carti’s ‘Music’), while opening track ‘The Fate Of Ophelia’ was the most-streamed song in a single day in Spotify history on Friday (October 3).
The physical and digital sales are boosted by the sheer volume of different versions of the record that Swift decided to release – including 12 CD versions, eight vinyl LPs, as well as deluxe CD boxsets, store-specific exclusives and a cassette version.
These were further expanded on Saturday when she announced four limited edition CDs, each with two extra acoustic versions of songs from the album – see all the details here and find any remaining stock here.
Since the album’s release, fans have been flocking to share their theories about the meanings behind the songs, with the track ‘Actually Romantic’ being dissected particularly closely.
Many have interpreted it as a shot at Charli XCX and her apparent diss track ‘Sympathy Is A Knife’ from 2024’s ‘Brat’, although Swift has said it is “a song about realising that someone else has kind of had a one-sided, adversarial relationship with you that you didn’t know about. And all of a sudden they start doing too much and they start letting you know that actually, you’ve been living in their head rent-free and you had no idea.”
Fans have also been sharing their thoughts on the record, with some calling it “her best album” and the return of “pop perfection”, and others declaring it “the worst Taylor Swift album yet” and “boring and basic”. You can also explore the range of Easter eggs and references on the album here.
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