Taylor Swift is steaming toward a record sales week.
By the time the official count is in on Friday, Swift’s “The Life of a Showgirl” is expected to sell 4 million copies.
Most of those will come from downloading of the album and streaming of the songs.
But none of it will come from downloading individual tracks.
Even though Swift is number 1 on the iTunes album chart, she has no spots on the singles chart.
That’s because none of the individual tracks on “Showgirl” were available for separate downloading. If you want the album, you have to buy it all.
On streaming services, that’s a different story. Swift’s 12 new tracks take up the entirety of the top of the Spotify and Apple music streaming charts. You can listen over and over to each one separately.
But by forcing actual paid customers to take the whole album, Swift pushed all sales there. So if a fan liked “The Fate of Ophelia” more than “Wood,” it didn’t matter.
And the result is 4 million “Showgirl” copies sold.
Should she get an asterisk? The “album only” feature hasn’t been seen on iTunes in a long, long time. None of the albums “Showgirl” is surpassed, like Adele’s “25,” had that issue. Fans could cherry pick songs from the list. What if Adele’s fans had really just wanted “Hello” and “Water Under the Bridge”? They could get them and leave the others behind. If “25” had had “album only,” it might have sold another million.
But Swift’s team know how to get water from a rock. No one will ever know if the 4 million sales of “Showgirl’ came from 4 million people, or from 1 million buying several different iterations. It doesn’t matter to the bottom line. But it might account for the fervor that’s been created.
The success of “Showgirl” saves the record industry for 2025. No one — except maybe Bad Bunny — has come close to those numbers. The business is in a torpor, with most new releases struggling to sell 300,000 copies in their first week. Does the “Showgirl” sale lift all the boats around it? Probably not. The exception might be Sabrina Carpenter, who’s featured on Swift’s title track.
As I say every day, the Swift marketing team — which includes her father, Scott — should teach MBA courses at American’s top business schools!
Now the question remains: will Swift’s people allow the tracks onto the iTunes top 100 or stick to “album only”?
