Taylor Swift continued to assert her dominance by topping the Billboard Hot 200 chart for the 15th consecutive week with her 11th studio album, The Tortured Poets Department.
The 34-year-old pop star successfully moved another 85K equivalent album units in the States of the album (13K more than newcomer Chappell Roan), so she would’ve still been number one even if she sold zero digital album downloads this past week – according to Billboard.
Some in the industry had criticized Taylor for ‘blocking’ her rivals by continuously dropping new digital variants and live versions of TTPD, which amassed yet another 10K downloads this week.
Among Swift’s recent digital variants were The Prophecy (Long Story Short – Live From Lyon) recorded on June 2 and thank You aimEe (Mean – Live from London) recorded on June 22.
When the 14-time Grammy winner debuted The Anthology double-album edition on April 18, all 31 tracks occupied the top 14 of the Billboard Hot 100 simultaneously for the first time in chart history.
On Spotify, where Taylor averages 91.6M monthly listeners, TTPD made history as the first album to accumulate one billion streams in a single week (in just five days).
‘The Tortured Poets Department [is] an anthology of new works that reflect events, opinions and sentiments from a fleeting and fatalistic moment in time – one that was both sensational and sorrowful in equal measure,’ Swift – who boasts 551.3M social media followers – wrote in April.
‘This period of the author’s life is now over, the chapter closed and boarded up. There is nothing to avenge, no scores to settle once wounds have healed. And upon further reflection, a good number of them turned out to be self-inflicted.
‘This writer is of the firm belief that our tears become holy in the form of ink on a page. Once we have spoken our saddest story, we can be free of it. And then all that’s left behind is the tortured poetry.’
The Pennsylvania-born hitmaker is currently enjoying a much-needed break from her $1.039B-grossing, 149-date The Eras Tour, which doesn’t resume until October 18–20 at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens, FL.
Taylor will next compete for 10 Moonperson trophies – including artist of the year – at the 2024 MTV Video Music Awards, which will be broadcast September 10 from the UBS Arena in Elmont, NY.
Swift has just two more archival albums (Taylor Swift and Reputation) to re-record after losing the rights to the first six of her master recordings by her underhanded ex-manager Scooter Braun, who’s since retired from the music industry.
On the personal front, the Emmy-winning producer and three-time Super Bowl champion Travis Kelce celebrated their first anniversary of dating last month.
