Taylor Swift Earns 7th No. 1 Album With ‘Folklore’

Taylor Swift made history on the Billboard charts this week thanks to her new album Folklore, which she released on July 24 after announcing it to fans that morning. The album debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 with the largest one-week sum of 2020, and has additionally become the best-selling album of the year. Folklore earned 846,000 album units in the United States, also making it the biggest week for any album in the U.S. since Swift’s last release, 2019’s Lover.

Folklore is Swift’s seventh No. 1 album on the Billboard 200, with all of the 30-year-old’s albums save for her eponymous debut earning the achievement. All seven of Swift’s No. 1 albums have debuted at No. 1, giving her the most of any female artist, just ahead of Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Madonna and Britney Spears, who have six each. In the last four years, the three biggest weeks for any album have been earned by Swift with Folklore, Lover and 2017’s Reputation. With Folklore, Swift became the first artist to have seven albums each sell at least 500,000 copies in a single week, doing so with all of her albums except for her debut.

Swift’s record label, Universal Music Group, shared that Folklore has sold over 2 million copies worldwide and earned over half a billion total streams on audio and video in just one week. It has reached No. 1 on iTunes in more than 85 countries, broken the global record for first-day album streams on Spotify by a female artist with 80.6 million and become the most-streamed pop album on Apple Music in 24 hours with 35.47 million streams.

In addition to Folklore‘s success, the album’s lead single, “Cardigan,” debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, making Swift the first artist in history to debut atop the Billboard Hot 100 and the Billboard 200 in the same week. All 16 songs from Folklore debuted inside the Hot 100 and two also made it into the Top 10: “The 1,” is at No. 4, and “Exile,” featuring Bon Iver, which is at No. 6. “Cardigan” is Swift’s second song to debut at No. 1 on the Hot 100 after “Shake it Off” in 2014. With the songs from Folklore, Swift now has 113 total career appearances on the Hot 100, making her the second female musician, behind Nicki Minaj, to chart 100 songs on the Hot 100.