Taylor Swift Bows With 4 Million Album Units as ‘The Life of a Showgirl’ Smashes Records in Its No. 1 Debut

It was already established, before the chart week was even over, that Taylor Swift‘s “The Life of a Showgirl” would not just bow at No. 1 but set a record for the highest number of equivalent album units in a single week. So the only question was how high it would go when figures were tallied up for all seven days. Now the answer is in. “Showgirl” officially bowed with 4.002 million equivalent album units million units for its first week, in Luminate data reported by Billboard. That’s a figure that breaks the previous record for most units in a week by more than a half-million.

Swift also set another chart record just by having the album debut at No. 1: According to Billboard, now that she is topping the chart with a 15th album, she now is the solo artist with the most No. 1 albums, having broken out of her previous tie with Drake and Jay-Z. (Among all artists, she trails only the Beatles, who have 19.)

On her Instagram, Swift left fans a message right after the news was announced. “I’ll never forget how excited I was in 2006 when my first album sold 40,000 copies in its first week. I was 16 and couldn’t even fathom that that many people would care enough about my music to invest their time and energy into it. Since then I’ve tried to meet and thank as many people as I could who have given me the chance to chase this insane dream. Here we are all these years later and a hundred times that many people showed up for me this week.”

She continued, “I have 4 million thank you’s I want to send to the fans, and 4 million reasons to feel even more proud of this album than I already was. Thank you for going out to celebrate this project in the movie theaters, investing in vinyl, streaming, watching the video, buying CDs, reading the poems I wrote inside the packaging, and immersing yourselves in ‘The Life of a Showgirl.’ I’ll cherish this feeling forever. Just wow. Thank you for the lovely bouquet,” she wrote in conclusion, quoting a lyric from the album’s title track.

The record for an album’s best week was previously held by Adele‘s “25,” which bowed with 3.482 million units in December 2015, a high-water mark that stood for just shy of a decade. It was previously reported that Swift didn’t even need a full week to topple Adele’s record; she did it in five days.

Swift soared well above her own previous first-week record. Her best debut prior to “Showgirl” was the 2.61 million units “The Tortured Poets Department” bowed with just last year.

The 4 million tally incorporates both sales and streaming data. Billboard reported that pure album sales totaled 3,479,500. In the streaming department, SEA units added another 522,600 to the total. That represented the 680.9 million on-demand official streams of tracks from the album

This No. 1 for Swift on the albums chart quickly follows the No. 1 she had at the box office a week ago with “Taylor Swift: The Official Release Party of a Showgirl.” That theatrical presentation, which was a confluence of videos, commentary and behind-the-scenes footage, rather than a proper film. made $33 million in theaters domestically over its limited three-day run.

Swift had some help in the sales department from many of her fans buying multiple copies of the album. The superstar issued dozens of variants of her album in vinyl, CD and digital download formats — 38 different ones, by Billboard’s last count, most of them limited editions featuring different cover art and/or acoustic bonus tracks.

The 3,479,500 copies in pure album sales for the first week set a record on Billboard’s sales chart, of course. It had previously been reported that 2.7 million were sold just on the first day, with all pre-sales being counted in that figure.