This week, the sales for Taylor Swift's The Life of a Showgirl finally hit the Billboard charts, and the album is — would you just believe it? — a huge success. Released Oct. 3, Swift's 12th studio LP has debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard albums chart, with all 12 of its songs landing in the Hot 100 singles chart and filling the entire Top 10. According to the industry data firm Luminate, it sold 4.002 million "equivalent album units" — the most an album has ever sold in its first week since Luminate began electronically collecting data in 1991.
But the most surprising takeaway from Showgirl's early numbers? How many of those sales were good old-fashioned vinyl.
The Life of a Showgirl sold 1.334 million copies on vinyl in its first week, beating the artist's previous record of 859,000 for 2024's The Tortured Poets Department. But how massive, really, is that amount of vinyl? Let's do some math.
Luminate puts total U.S. vinyl sales for this year so far at 30 million units. That means that Showgirl's vinyl sales account for nearly 4.5% of that — and that's just for the first week.
To further put that figure into perspective, look at how vinyl sales by a few of Swift's pop peers have stacked up this year. By Luminate's count, as of Oct. 2, future Super Bowl headliner Bad Bunny has only sold 51,000 vinyl copies of his January album DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS. Morgan Wallen has sold 90,000 vinyl copies of May's I'm the Problem, while Showgirl guest star Sabrina Carpenter has sold 197,000 of August's Man's Best Friend.
If that's still too abstract, here's a more grounded comparison: The sprawling Minneapolis record emporium Electric Fetus estimates that it has roughly 32,000 vinyl LPs in stock for sale. To amass the number of records equivalent to Showgirl's initial vinyl sales, someone would have to walk into Electric Fetus, buy all of the vinyl, come back after they've restocked that amount, buy it all up again, and repeat the process 42 times in total.
Showgirl's vinyl tally is also more than is currently housed in some of the biggest music collections and libraries. If you combined the number of vinyl albums housed in the New York Public Library's Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound (over 200,000) and the BBC's Sound Archive (approximately 370,000), it still doesn't come close to Swift's 1.334 million.
And let's say, just for a thought experiment, that each of those LPs went for $29.99, the current price for the vinyl on Swift's own webstore (retailers like Amazon and Target, and depending on the variant carried, have slightly different pricing.) At that individual price, Showgirl's vinyl sales would have brought in over $40 million overall. With that kind of money, you could feasibly buy:
- Over 6.6 million Big Macs, priced at an average of $6.01 each, per The Economist's Big Mac Index
- 77 Rolls-Royce Phantoms, priced at $517,750 each
- Over 12,500 competition-grade basketball hoops, priced at $3,199 each (assuming Taylor springs for a high-end model in the driveway of her dreams)
That's a lot of money. It's also a lot of Taylor Swift music being played out in the world, assuming all of these customers actually spin their copies on a record player (and haven't simply left them out on their stoop to warp after hearing "CANCELLED!").
Finally, if time matters more to you than money: The 12-track Showgirl runs 41 minutes and 45 seconds. If you were to listen to each of those 1.334 million vinyl albums back to back, the total duration would be nearly 106 years.
And since it takes about 30 seconds to press an individual copy of a vinyl album in 2025, in the 11,117 hours it took to physically produce all of those Showgirl copies, you could fly from New York to Tokyo about 790 times.
So, yeah: It's a lot of vinyl.
Meanwhile, how did Swift do streaming-wise? Per Billboard, The Life of a Showgirl racked up 680.9 million on-demand official streams of the songs on the album. Not bad at all.
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