Taylor Swift’s Latest Album Breaks Records
Taylor Swift’s latest album, The Life of a Showgirl, has achieved the largest opening week in Great Britain in 2025, selling 304,000 copies since its release on Friday. This surpasses the first-week sales of other notable albums, such as The Tortured Poets Department (270,000 copies) and Midnights (204,000 copies). With just three days of sales, Swift has already achieved the biggest first-week sale in Great Britain since Ed Sheeran’s album in 2017.
Sales Figures and Chart Performance
The star is also on track to have the best-selling album of the year as a whole, currently held by Sabrina Carpenter, who features in Life of a Showgirl’s title track. Carpenter’s album has moved 444,000 copies since January. Swift’s album has broken records in the United States as well, achieving 2.7 million sales on Friday alone. This is Swift’s largest sales week of all time and the second-largest sales week for any album since 1991.
Vinyl Sales and US Records
The Life of a Showgirl has also smashed the US record for most vinyl albums sold in a single week, with 1.2 million copies sold on wax. This is at least partially due to the star releasing eight collective variants of the record. The previous one-week vinyl record was also set by Swift, when her last album sold 859,000 copies on vinyl in its first week.
Industry Context and Critical Reviews
The Swift sales figures are all the more impressive given that album sales are in a state of constant decline elsewhere in the industry. In Great Britain, only one other album has shifted more than 100,000 copies in a week this year – Sam Fender’s album. Ed Sheeran’s latest album sold 67,000 units when it was released last month. Critical reviews of The Life of a Showgirl have been mixed, with Variety Magazine calling it "contagious joyful" and the Financial Times saying it "was missing sparkle".
Personal Life and Future Plans
The album captures the blossoming romance between Swift and American footballer Travis Kelce, who announced their engagement last month. Swift has dismissed rumors that she plans to retire from music to focus on her personal life, saying "It’s not the reason why people get married – so that they can cancel their job." The star has also achieved success at the box office, selling $46 million (34 million GBP) in tickets for her 89-minute film Taylor Swift: The Official Release Party of a Showgirl. The film features the premiere of her music video for the song "The Fate of Ophelia", behind-the-scenes footage, and Swift’s comments on the songs.
