Taylor Swift is your new Queen of Vinyl. The vinyl edition of the pop star’s latest (all original) full-length, evermore, just broke the record for best sales week — and it only took three days to do it.
As Billboard reports, initial data from sales tracking company MRC Data shows that evermore moved 40,000 vinyl units between its May 28th release and May 30th. Considering that number is obviously expected to grow ahead of the week’s official close on June 3rd, that means Swift will easily snap the record previously held by Jack White’s Lazaretto. It took White’s LP the full week of June 7th-13th, 2014 to reach the same 40K number. (Previously knonw as SoundScan, MRC Data began tracking vinyl sales in 1991.)
Of course, Swift’s evermore had some advantages helping putting its sales over the top (in addition to her massive fame). For one, pre-orders have been live for nearly six months, as the vinyl edition was announced way back in December but not released until a few days ago. That’s likely because evermore was a surprise release following folklore, and Republic Records wasn’t afforded the usual production time for physical formats.
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Then there’s the fact that the pandemic seems to have been rather beneficial for the sale of vinyl albums, numbers that were already resurgent for 15 years running. 2020 was the best year on record, as vinyl outsold CDs for the first time in 34 years. The year also closed with vinyl’s best sales week in history, with 1.842 million slabs of wax sold ahead of Christmas.
The vinyl sales record is just the latest achievement Swift has earned thanks to evermore. It also gave her the record for shortest gap between No. 1 albums, coming just four months and 18 days after folklore. That latter effort also earned Album of the Year honors at the 2021 Grammys.
As Swift racks up accolades for her new music, she’s also busy revisiting her older material. In April, she released Fearless (Taylor’s Version), the first entry in her series of re-recordings of her 2006-2017 catalog. The initiative comes after her masters were bought — and then sold again — by music manager Scooter Braun. By recording new versions of the material, Swift aims to undermine the value of those old masters while giving herself control over the modern versions of the songs.
Swift has also launched a “From the Vault” series, featuring previously unreleased tracks seeing the light of day for the first time. Early tracks from the series include Fearless-era numbers “You All Over Me” and “Mr. Perfectly Fine”.
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