by Josh Silverstein
It doesn't matter how you consume music, Taylor Swift is going to break the record associated with your medium of choice thanks to The Tortured Poets Department. Hot on the heels of setting a new high-mark for streams in a day on Spotify, Taylor Swift has now shattered her own record for vinyl sales with the staggering first-week success of her latest album.
It might sound a little meta to hear that Taylor Swift has broken her own record for selling records but that's actually what she's done. By selling 700,000 copies of The Tortured Poets Department on vinyl in its first three days of release, she broke the record for most sales of a vinyl album in a week.
The previous mark was held by Swift as well, for last year's release of 1989 (Taylor’s Version), which sold 693,000 copies in a week.
And if you're beginning to sense a theme here, you're not wrong — Swift also held the record before than, for the release week of Midnights in October 2022 when she garnered 570,000 in LP sales.
Swift therefore now holds the top three spots for most weekly vinyl record sales of all time, which is pretty impressive considering most people either download or stream their music these days. Although, to be fair, vinyl sales have only been tracked since 1991, when SoundScan first began collecting sales data for album sales in the various musical formats.
Still, Swift's sales figures for vinyl records are staggering and should be even more impressive when we see the final figure at the end of this first week of release for The Tortured Poets Department.
Whatever the motivations for the epic sales figures, people are buying Taylor Swift's The Tortured Poets Department in droves on vinyl and show no signs of slowing down anytime soon.