Taylor Swift’s ‘Speak Now’ Sells One Million in First Week!
Taylor Swift debuts at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and the Country Albums charts this week with 'Speak Now,' scoring the best first-week sales for an album since 2005's 'The Massacre' by 50 Cent. With 1,047,000 copies of 'Speak Now' sold, according to Nielsen SoundScan, Taylor outdistanced the estimates of many industry forecasters who had predicted her album would sell 800,000 to 900,000. The last time an album notched sales over one million in its debut week was in 2008, when Lil Wayne's 'ThaCarter III' entered the charts at No. 1 with sales of 1,006,000.
According to Billboard, 'Speak Now' also achieved the second-largest sales week of any country album since 1991, when Garth Brooks' 1998 disc 'Double Live' launched with sales of 1,085,000. Taylor does, however, earn the distinction of having the biggest sales week of any female country artist since 1991, when Shania Twain's 'Up!' sold 874,000 copies in its debut week in 2002.
The publication also notes that Taylor had the best week for a woman on the album chart since 2000, when Britney Spears debuted at No. 1 with 'Oops! I Did It Again,' selling 1,319,000 in its first week. Only four albums by women have ever earned million-plus weeks on the chart. Taylor and Britney are joined in that elite club by Whitney Houston's 'The Bodyguard' soundtrack (selling 1,061,000 copies during Christmas week,1992) and Norah Jones' 'Feels Like Home,' a No. 1 debut in 2004 with 1,022,000 copies sold.
'Speak Now' is already the eighth best-selling album of all for 2010. Lady Antebellum's 'Need You Now' is currently No. 2 for the year, behind Eminem's 'Recovery.' Both of those discs have sold close to three million copies this year.
One last bit of Taylor chart-domination news: the 20-year-old superstar owns exactly one-half of the Top 20 Country Digital Tracks chart this week with 10 tunes from 'Speak Now' firmly entrenched there. All of the tracks are, in fact, within the top 13 spots on the chart!
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