Taylor Swift’s “Folklore” came out of gate unexpected and hot in its first week. Total sales including streaming of singles came to 835,000. Around 627,000 of that was digital album sales on iTunes and other downloading services.
But there will be a HUGE drop in the second week according to hitsdailydouble.com and Buzz Angle/Alpha Data. Total sales will be around 125,000 all in. And only 25,000 of those will be from downloads. The rest will be attributed to streaming.
That means a 95% drop in digital downloads, and an over all drop by 85% including streaming. Pretty much everyone who wanted “Folklore” bought it in week 1. The stragglers are here for week 2.
What happened? Taylor couldn’t promote the album. I mean, she could have if she wanted to be clever. But all regular conventional means were unavailable thanks to the pandemic. And her four big stadium concerts for mid summer were long ago cancelled.
There were no CDs, either. I don’t know why. That really hurt her. It’s not too late, but I doubt even the most ardent fans are going to double buy.
At least a lot of celebrities got cardigans. That’s some consolation.
