Taylor Swift Earns Her Fourth No. 1 in 16 Months With New ‘Red’

At the start of 2020, Taylor Swift’s itinerary for the near future looked simple enough.

She planned to tour that summer to support her latest No. 1 album, “Lover.” And although Swift had said she would be rerecording her old albums after the sale of her former record company, she gave no indication of when. So there was little reason to expect any imminent new music from Swift, who had long stuck to a regimen of one studio album every few years.

But 2020 and 2021 have seen a remarkable flurry of recording activity from Swift, and record-breaking chart success. Last year came two quarantine albums, “Folklore” and “Evermore,” and this year she has been focused on her rerecordings — meticulous re-creations of her earlier work, casting the act as empowering business move, retribution against the investors that now control some of her original recordings, and an opportunity to revisit youthful themes with a more mature eye.

“Fearless (Taylor’s Version)” came in April, and now “Red (Taylor’s Version)” has become Swift’s fourth No. 1 album in 16 months, which Billboard says is the fastest run in the 65-year history of its album chart. Since “Folklore” came out in July 2020, Swift has held the No. 1 spot on Billboard’s album chart a total of 15 times.

“Red (Taylor’s Version)” had the equivalent of 605,000 sales in the United States in its first week, according to MRC Data, Billboard’s tracking arm. That total includes 303 million streams and 369,000 copies sold as a complete package. It sold 114,000 copies on vinyl LP — which Swift released as a $50 set of four discs at 45 r.p.m. — which is the most that any album has sold on vinyl since at least 1991, when SoundScan, MRC’s predecessor, began reporting reliable data on record sales.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/22/arts/music/taylor-swift-red-taylors-version-billboard-chart.html