As expected, Taylor Swift‘s new album Lover easily tops the Billboard 200 chart this week. According to Nielsen Music‘s data, Lover totaled 867,000 equivalent album units, 679,000 in album sales. Both figures are the largest since Swift’s last album, 2017’s reputation, debuted with 1.238 million units in its first week (1.216 million of which were in album sales).
Lover‘s sales figures were also boosted by multiple deluxe edition of the record available at Target, along with a variety of merchandise bundles online. Billboard notes that back in 2017, Swift kept reputation as an iTunes exclusive for its digital release in its first week and entirely off streaming services for three weeks, plus its numbers were tied to a promotion involving her upcoming tour. Lover is also Swift’s first album to be available on all digital and streaming services in its first week.
With its streaming total of 175,000 SEA units, which equals 226 million on-demand audio streams for its songs, Lover gives Swift the second-biggest streaming week ever for a female artist, following Ariana Grande‘s Thank U, Next earlier this year. Additionally, thanks to Lover, Swift is now the only female artist to have six different records sell half-a-million albums in a single week. Eminem is the only other artist to achieve this.
Swift thanked her fans for taking Lover to #1 in a short video posted to social media over the weekend:
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— Taylor Swift (@taylorswift13) August 31, 2019
