Pop icon Taylor Swift has once again shattered industry records with her latest album, “The Life of A Showgirl.” In its debut week, the album generated approximately $135 million in revenue, according to estimates from Billboard.
This impressive figure stems from the album’s staggering first-week performance, where it sold 4.002 million equivalent album units—making it the only album in the modern era to surpass the 4 million mark. This figure accounted for more than half (50.01%) of all current album sales in the U.S. during that week. Additionally, the album benefitted from an extensive marketing campaign launched by Swift and her record label, Republic.
While global album unit statistics are not available from Luminate, “The Life of a Showgirl” achieved 1.4 billion global streams in its first week. This number was calculated by Billboard by aggregating global stream counts for each song on the album as reported by Luminate.
The Showgirl album was released with 38 variants across about a dozen different editions. These included several colored vinyl versions, each featuring add-ons such as posters, autographed photos, and acoustic bonus tracks. Many of these were limited or deluxe editions, which created an incredible buying frenzy among Swift fans. Additionally, because of the extra features, most of these variants had wholesale prices higher than the typical cost levels usually offered to retailers for CD and vinyl formats.
Since the preorder launch in August, most editions exclusive to Swift’s webstore were sold for limited time periods. Target offered an exclusive CD, and there was a widely available standard CD. During the album’s street week, four CD variants with bonus tracks were initially exclusive to Swift’s webstore before becoming available at independent record stores.
However, the biggest revenue driver is that non-traditional channels, online CD stores like Amazon and the official Taylor Swift webstore, as well as Christian stores and chains like Urban Outfitters, accounted for 70% of all the album’s consumption units.
Within that, Billboard estimates that Swift’s own store garnered the overwhelming bulk of that, or more than 65% market share of Showgirl’s total first week of 4.002 million album consumption units.
The Swift store provided a significant revenue boost by charging retail prices that mirrored those of brick-and-mortar stores instead of offering wholesale prices. For instance, while retailers reported that the wholesale price for the Swift vinyl was $23.49 and $10.34 for CDs, the Swift webstore sold the vinyl album for $29.99, representing a 27.6% markup over wholesale, and the CD for $12.99, reflecting a 25.6% markup. This means that albums sold through Swift’s webstore generated at least 25% higher revenue per unit compared to what she received from physical retail sales, resulting in a higher profit margin for both her and Republic Records. (Republic Records did not respond to a request for comment.)
Additionally, the Swift store offered two CD box sets that bundled the album with a Showgirl hoodie and a Showgirl cardigan, priced at $65 and $70, respectively, which further increased revenue.
In total, “Showgirl” sold 1.76 million CDs, 1.334 million vinyl albums, 358,000 album downloads, and 26,000 cassette albums. It also accumulated 523,000 stream equivalent albums in the U.S., thanks to nearly 682 million on-demand streams in the first week, according to Luminate. Excluding streams, these sales figures comprised 71% of all albums sold in the U.S. that week, 77% of all CDs sold, 66% of all vinyl sold, 58% of all digital albums sold, and 72% of all physical albums sold.
