Taylor Alison Swift is a U.S. singer-songwriter and actor. Originally a country music star, she crossed over into the mainstream pop market with her second full-length album Fearless in 2008. Since then her career has been meteoric.
Swift’s album 1989 was the biggest-selling album during the first half of 2015. The album has sold a massive 1,328,000 copies during this period. The total rises to a gigantic 2,011,000 copies if the figures include streaming-equivalent sales. Someway behind, Canadian hip-hop star Drake comes along in second place with 965,000 albums sold, with most of the purchases for If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late.
Putting together CDs, cassettes, vinyl LPs, digital albums, and streaming the full list is (along with total numbers of ‘units’):
1. Taylor Swift, 1989, 2,011,000 units in the U.S.
2. Drake, If You’re Reading This, 1,431,000
3. Ed Sheeran, X, 1,428,000
4. Fifty Shades of Grey soundtrack, 1,402,000
5. Sam Smith, In The Lonely Hour, 1,296,000
6. Meghan Trainor, Title, 1,209,000
7. Furious 7 soundtrack, 971,000
8. Maroon 5, V, 966,000
9. Nicki Minaj, Pinkprint, 825,000
10. Fall Out Boy, American Beauty, 813,000
(It should be noted that with “streaming” 1,500 streams is converted into one album sale.)
Another accolade for Swift is that in 2015 she became the youngest woman ever to be included on Forbes’ “100 Most Powerful Women” list, ranking at number 64.
In related news, Swift’s success will be less down to compact disc sales and more to digital downloads and music streaming according to new figures issued by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). These figures have recently been analyzed by Digital Journal. Interestingly vinyl sales are up as well; however, avid purchasers of vinyl may not be in Swift’s demographic.
