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in MusicThe singer’s blockbuster new album, “Midnights,” holds strong atop the Billboard 200 chart, and her single “Anti-Hero” is No. 1 on the Hot 100.Following the expectation-shattering blockbuster debut of her new album, “Midnights,” Taylor Swift has coasted to a second week atop the charts, earning the equivalent of another 342,000 album sales, according to the tracking service Luminate.Although “Midnights” experienced a 78 percent drop in its second week of release — down from 1,578,000 in sales the week prior — Swift’s follow-up performance was still good enough for the third-largest total of the year so far, topping even the debut of Beyoncé’s “Renaissance.” (Other than “Midnights” last week, only Harry Styles’s “Harry’s House” sold more.)Swift managed to move more than one million copies of “Midnights” in its first week largely on the strength of physical merchandise, including vinyl, CDs and even cassettes. But the album lingers at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 this week thanks to its consistency on streaming services, where it totaled 294 million plays (down from 549 million).Combining digital plays, downloads and purchases of the complete album, the second-week sales of “Midnight” were the largest for any album in its second week since Adele’s “25” in 2015, Billboard said.Swift also maintains a healthy standing on the singles chart, the Hot 100, where she had previously occupied all of the Top 10 — a first in the chart’s history. This week, the single “Anti-Hero” holds at No. 1, with Swift songs also landing at No. 6, 7 and 9.Rihanna’s new single, “Lift Me Up,” a ballad from the “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” soundtrack, debuts at No. 2.Rounding out the Top 5 on the album chart are Lil Baby’s “It’s Only Me” at No. 2, Bad Bunny’s “Un Verano Sin Ti” at No. 3, the special edition reissue of the Beatles’ “Revolver” at No. 4 and Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album” at No. 5.In its 95 weeks on the chart, Wallen’s album has only fallen from the Top 10 once. More
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in MusicThe singer-songwriter described her planned concerts as “a journey through all of my musical eras of my career.”For the first time in five years, Taylor Swift is going on tour.Following the blockbuster success of her latest album, “Midnights,” which sold over a million copies in its first week out and took over the entire Top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100, Swift said on Tuesday that she would be going on the road, starting in March.The Eras Tour will play stadiums across the United States through next August, with international dates to be announced. The opening acts on the American leg include Paramore, beabadoobee, Phoebe Bridgers, girl in red, Muna, Haim, Gayle, Gracie Abrams and Owenn.The “eras” theme — which she described in a taped appearance on “Good Morning America” as “a journey through all of my musical eras of my career” — solves one potential problem that had been facing Swift: picking what parts of her rapidly growing catalog to focus on. “Midnights” is her 10th studio album, and the last couple of years have been extraordinarily productive for her, with two indie-folk-style LPs recorded in the early stages of the pandemic (“Folklore” and “Evermore”) and two rerecorded versions of old albums (“Fearless” and “Red”).The last tour that Swift completed was in 2018, for her album “Reputation,” released the year before. She had planned a series of stadium shows and international festival dates in 2020, connected to her album “Lover,” but those were canceled amid the pandemic.“Midnights,” which broke streaming records on Spotify and Apple Music, opened on the latest Billboard album chart with the equivalent of 1,578,000 sales in the United States, including 549 million streams and a whopping 1,140,000 copies sold as a complete package — the biggest total for a new album in seven years, and the first time any album has sold more than a million copies since “Reputation.” More
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in MusicThe singer-songwriter’s latest album is a blockbuster, debuting with the biggest weekly total for any LP since Adele’s “25” in 2015.Taylor Swift’s latest album was always going to be a hit.She’s Taylor Swift, first of all. And “Midnights,” which was released on Oct. 21, is her first new pop album since 2019, after an extremely productive couple of years in which she released two indie-folk-style LPs and two rerecorded versions of old records.Yet even for a superstar like Swift, the scale of her latest success has stunned the music industry.In its first week out, “Midnights” had the equivalent of 1,578,000 sales in the United States, according to the tracking service Luminate — the biggest weekly take for any album in seven years, since Adele’s “25” arrived with a boom of nearly 3.5 million (and with the full album then absent from streaming).On the Hot 100 chart for songs, Swift benefits from her strong streaming numbers, currently occupying every spot in the Top 10, a Billboard first.Streaming has so rewritten the math of the music business that in recent years it had become practically an article of faith that no record would ever again cross a time-honored threshold of blockbuster sales: moving more than a million copies in a single week, as artists like ’N Sync, the Backstreet Boys and Eminem did multiple times in the old days. The last record to hit this mark was Swift’s “Reputation,” in 2017. Since then, both Swift’s “Lover” (2019) and Adele’s “30” (2021) failed to reach the magic seven digits.But “Midnights” has easily crossed that line, and not only in “equivalent sales,” a composite number used by Luminate and Billboard to reconcile the various ways fans consume music now, counting streaming, sales and track downloads. Of the 1,578,000 “equivalents” for “Midnights,” 1,140,000 were copies sold as a complete package — in other words, purchases of the album as a whole. It is Swift’s fifth album to sell at least a million copies in a single week, and no album by any artist has had better weekly sales since “Reputation” opened with 1,216,000.The Cultural Impact of Taylor Swift’s MusicNew LP: “Midnight,” Taylor Swift’s 10th studio album is a return to the pop pipeline, with production from her longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff. Here is what our critic thought of it.Millennial Anti-Hero: On her latest album, Swift probes the realizations and reckonings of many 30-something women around relationships, motherhood and ambition.Fight for Her Masters: Revisit the origin story of Swift’s rerecordings of her older albums: a feud with the powerful manager Scooter Braun.Pandemic Records: In 2020, Swift released two new albums, “Folklore” and “Evermore.” In debuting a new sound, she turned to indie music.How did she do it?That is always the question for Swift, who is not only one of the most vital creative forces in 21st-century pop but also perhaps its greatest marketer. In a year of many disappointing releases, with albums by Drake, Post Malone, Kendrick Lamar and other big names posting surprisingly low numbers, Swift promoted her release cleverly online, with cheeky TikTok videos and drip-drip revelations, and advertised an array of product variations that got fans reaching for their credit cards.“She can create an event record,” said Keith Caulfield, Billboard’s senior director of charts. “She’s done that with ‘Midnights.’”The biggest factor ended up being physical media. Those formats, like CD, vinyl and cassette, now make up just 10 percent of all recorded music revenue in the United States — streaming is 84 percent — but they are often embraced by fans eager to own something tangible by their favorite artists, and can play an important role in a new record’s chart position.The standard CD and LP versions of “Midnights” came in four forms, with variant artwork, and Target sold additional variations, with lavender-colored vinyl or three extra tracks on its CD. Swift also sold autographed versions through her website, and three hours after “Midnights” came out she released an expanded “3am Edition,” with seven extra tracks. In the most commented-upon gimmick, the back covers of the four vinyl versions, when arranged in a grid, form the numbers of a clock, and, for $49, Swift’s website even sold the parts of a wall clock to bring it all together. “Collect all 4 editions!” Swift’s website said when promoting the releases.It worked. “Midnights” sold 575,000 copies on vinyl, along with 395,000 on CD and even 10,000 on cassette. There were also 161,000 copies of the album sold as a digital download.Collectible CD and vinyl versions are nothing new. K-pop groups like BTS and Blackpink have been releasing new albums with elaborate CD packaging for years. Two weeks ago, the Red Hot Chili Peppers released a new album, “Return of the Dream Canteen,” in 10 vinyl variations.Yet Swift’s success with the strategy is as extraordinary as you might expect. Her 575,000 vinyl sales are the most any album has sold on that format since at least 1991, when SoundScan, a predecessor of Luminate, began keeping reliable data on music sales. It is more than three times as many as the previous record, when Harry Styles’s “Harry’s House” notched 182,000 vinyl copies in May.The success of “Midnights” is not just a vinyl or CD phenomenon. It also had 549 million streams, the third-best weekly total for any album. Drake has the two best showings in that metric, with “Scorpion” (746 million in 2018) and “Certified Lover Boy” (744 million, 2021). So far this year, the only other album to come close was Bad Bunny’s “Un Verano Sin Ti,” which opened with 357 million streams back in May. (For now, “Un Verano” is still the year’s biggest album, with the equivalent of 2.9 million sales, largely from streaming.)“Midnights,” of course, opened at No. 1 on Billboard’s latest album chart. It is Swift’s 11th album to reach the peak, tying her with Bruce Springsteen, Barbra Streisand and Drake. Only Jay-Z (with 14) and the Beatles (with 19) have had more titles at No. 1.Also this week, Lil Baby’s “It’s Only Me,” last week’s chart-topper, falls to No. 2, and Bad Bunny’s “Un Verano” slips to No. 3 in its 25th week out — its first time dipping lower than second place, including 13 times at No. 1.Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album,” now in its 94th week out — all but one in the Top 10 — holds at No. 4, and “The Highlights,” a hits compilation by the Weeknd, is No. 5. More
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