Taylor Swift has moved approximately two million traditional album copies of The Tortured Poets Department. Photo Credit: Lee Campbell
Who says the album’s irrelevant in 2024? Besides breaking several streaming records, Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department approached two million “traditional album sales” during its first week of availability, according to new data.
That sales milestone, reflecting albums moved across permanent downloads, cassette, CD, and vinyl alike between April 19th and 25th, entered the media spotlight in a breakdown from Billboard. Citing Luminate data, the outlet specifically identified 1.914 million Tortured Poets Department units sold directly throughout the stretch.
Notably, vinyl accounted for 859,000 units within that sales sum – leaving north of one million units for digital, CDs, and cassettes. As calculated in album-equivalent units, the overall figure came in at 2.61 million for the lengthy project during the same period, per the breakdown.
While Swift’s commercial feats already command ample media attention – we’ve covered the multiple on-demand records attributable to The Tortured Poets Department – selling two million traditional albums in one week is especially significant given streaming’s prevalence.
According to the RIAA, 84 percent of the United States’ $17.12 billion in recorded revenue derived from streaming in 2023, compared to 11 percent for physical. And for the entirety of last year, the trade organization pinpointed 43.2 million vinyl units shipped (not necessarily sold to customers) – making Swift’s album-sales accomplishment particularly meaningful.
Needless to say, the artist, whose Eras Tour is scheduled to touch down in Europe next month, is selling in other nations around the globe as well. It’d take time to chart these results in even relative detail, but The Tortured Poets Department’s showing thus far in China is worth highlighting.
Boasting today’s fifth-largest music industry, China proved a meaningful market for Swift with several past releases. Closer to the present, various Tortured Poets Department uploads on Tencent Music’s QQ have drawn the better part of 19,000 cumulative fan comments and remain the subject of in-depth discussions.
(Though detailed album-consumption data was available via QQ when Midnights made waves back in 2022, the service, at least when accessed from the U.S., now displays comparatively few stats. Most conspicuously, album sales are no longer viewable on the appropriate pages, the platform shows.)
Additionally, “Fortnight” by Swift and Post Malone has topped Apple Music’s daily Top 100 chart in China, where NetEase Cloud Music users have shared the corresponding album almost 37,000 times and are also discussing it at length.
On Weibo (where the 14-time Grammy winner has 10.2 million fans), Swift posted the same English-language message that she published to X, Instagram, and more, making clear that she’s “completely floored by the love you’ve shown this album” and reiterating its strong sales.
