Taylor Swift’s folklore Posts Biggest #1 Debut Of 2020

Beth Garrabrant

Taylor Swift’s folklore Posts Biggest #1 Debut Of 2020

Beth Garrabrant

Taylor Swift’s new album folklore has debuted at the top of the Billboard 200 chart with 846,000 equivalent album units. It’s the biggest debut for an album since her previous album, last year’s Lover, which started out with 867,000 units. Naturally, that also makes it the biggest album debut of 2020 so far, beating out Juice WRLD’s posthumous Legends Never Die, which scored 497,000 equivalent album units a few weeks ago.

Per Billboard, folklore’s units are made up of 615,000 album sales, 218,000 streaming equivalent albums (racking up 289.85 million streams total) and 13,000 track equivalent albums.

After a week, folklore is already the best-selling album of 2020 with those 615,000 copies, surpassing BTS’ Map Of The Soul: 7, which was released in February and has sold 574,000 copies so far.

It’s Swift’s seventh album to debut at the top of the Billboard chart. She now holds the record for the most #1 debuts among women. (Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Madonna and Britney Spears are all tied at 6. And Jay-Z holds the record for most #1 debuts with 14.) She is also the first artist to have seven different albums sell at least a half million copies in a single week — she was previously tied with Eminem.

She also had the largest streaming week of 2020 for an album by a woman with 289.85 million on-demand streams. She was beat out there by Juice WRLD’s Legends Never Die, which had 422.63 million streams in its first week, and Lil Uzi Vert’s Eternal Atake, which had 400.42 million and 348.72 million in its first and second weeks.

Notably, Swift achieved this without a traditional album rollout — she announced folklore a day before it was released — and limited retail availability. Physical purchases were primarily done through her website or digital retailers. The folklore CD will hit traditional retailers on 8/7.

Logic’s “final” album No Pressure debuted at #2 on the Billboard 200 with 221,000 equivalent album units. Legends Never Die dropped to #3, followed by Pop Smoke’s Shoot For The Stars Aim For The Moon, and the original Broadway cast recording of Hamilton rounds out the top 5.

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