Taylor Swift - The Tortured Poets Department (April 19, 2024) Album • Page 103

This sounds like my wife.
Is your mom my wife?
Am I your dad?!?!?!?!?

 

There is also the fact that Taylor is a “everyone feels the need to listen at least once” artist, which boosts that opening week number even more. It’s why I don’t think it’s at all an indictment of the album that it isn’t performing proportionally to what the Wallen album did. His album eight weeks in was still doing one third of his opening week numbers. If Taylor’s were doing that, it would be still be putting up like 868k per week, and that’s not realistic. I’m more interested that, even if you’re not looking at it proportionally, his album two months later was still doing bigger raw numbers than hers two months later. I would honestly not have expected that.

It’s so interesting, because country in a lot of ways is still operating like how the broader music industry did in the 1990s and 2000s. Still a lot of CD sales, still possible for artists to eke out a bunch of hit singles per album, still possible for albums to have long lives. It’s a fascinating like island in the music industry.

Hard to argue your point when looking at that graph, haha. That said, I’ll be interested to keep an eye on this for the next year or so. Her album is just fading faster than I thought it would given the sheer number of songs. I kind of thought it would replicate the Wallen run from last year but bigger.

For the record, I’m not actually arguing that Wallen is bigger than Taylor, just thought it was an interesting question to interrogate. What I would probably argue is that he’s pretty firmly the second biggest act out there right now, at least in America. There’s so much talk about how it’s Taylor and Beyoncé and then everyone else, but I think it’s Taylor, then Morgan Wallen, then everyone else.

 

Is Morgan Wallen bigger than The Weeknd?

 

Right now? Absolutely.

 

Yeah Abel is more inconsistent , but his hits do insane numbers

 

This is where I disagree with the premise. The "traditional" methods were novel when first introduced, and then became traditional because they became what everyone tried to do. The methods of buying end caps ended up being considered normal business for big stars (the indie labels fudging numbers for albums sold in smaller venues less so), the big radio promos and pushes, the late night appearances, they're all part of the same game. Her marketing team is much more aggressive about it (we saw Blink-182 literally do this same thing to get the number one album in October), but they're also some of the best in the biz at doing this. Which is why they have this job. They keep the job by keeping the numbers up, that's what they're paid to do. Think of your job, if you told your boss "we did good enough last week, I have a way we could do good this week too, but I'm not gonna do it," you're probably in trouble. This is the new buying an ad in Target.

I disagree with this as well. He is also not being "traditional" - with the massive track list built for streaming. 36 songs! And the last raw numbers I saw had it at I think almost half of sales as Taylors first week. Like, sure, that's great, but we're talking different games when your end of year tally is still not even close to the first week of the other artist? Edit: Numbers wrong.

Like, this stat from the same article: "Swift sold more albums in 2023 than any other act, accounting for 6% of all albums sold, industry-wide." is absurd.

 

Todays merch drop was a hoodie and a $400 acoustic guitar.
The guitar is sold out already

 

Just a quick note: Wallen's total number for One Thing at a Time in 2023 was 5.362 million units, which is more than twice Taylor's first week for TTPD, not half Taylor's first week. Taylor doing half that in one week is still extremely impressive, but it's not quite as "she's in a different league than everyone else" as what you're saying here. (Midnights was a distant second last year, with 3.209 million units.)

 

Why does Billboard say 1.2m in 2023? Guess I read their article wrong, or only saw physical sales, or its outdated. Stupid skimming. My bad. Editing.

 

And all this because he was recorded saying the N word, wild

 

There are a lot of different numbers getting bandied about in that report. Here's just the albums list:

TOP 10 ALBUMS OF 2023 IN U.S., BY TOTAL EQUIVALENT ALBUM UNITS
1. Morgan Wallen, One Thing at a Time (5.362 million)
2. Taylor Swift, Midnights (3.209 million)
3. SZA, SOS (3.172 million)
4. Taylor Swift, 1989 (Taylor’s Version) (2.872 million)
5. Morgan Wallen, Dangerous: The Double Album (2.179 million)
6. Taylor Swift, Lover (1.875 million)
7. Travis Scott, Utopia (1.782 million)
8. Taylor Swift, Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) (1.775 million)
9. Taylor Swift, Folklore (1.612 million)
10. Metro Boomin, Heroes & Villains (1.573 million)

 

Looks like it has now passed 5 mill too: https://www.reddit.com/r/TaylorSwif...ghts_has_now_sold_over_5_million_total_units/

ChatGPT, tell me who sold more albums:
Taylor Swift sold a total of ( 3.209 + 2.872 + 1.875 + 1.775 + 1.612 = 11.343 ) million copies.

Morgan Wallen sold a total of ( 5.362 + 2.179 = 7.541 ) million copies.

Therefore, Taylor Swift sold ( 11.343 - 7.541 = 3.802 ) million more copies than Morgan Wallen.

 

7 million albums sold and I've still never heard a Morgan Wallen song or know a single person in real life that has.

 

Is he popular in the UK? I don't think I've heard of him either except on this website.

 

I listen to enough problematic emo singers, don't need to add the racist country ones to my collection.

 

Last night we let the liquor talk…

 

5.362 million in a single calendar year is gargantuan. It just is. The top album the year before that was Bad Bunny and that "only" did 3.4 million. The year before it was Wallen (again) with 3.226 million. 2020 was Lil Baby (apparently?) with 2.632 million. 2019 was Post Malone (3 million), 2018 was Drake 3.91 million, and so on. I assume TTPD will be tops this year, and I'm interested to see what number it will hit. Already around 4.3 million so far. Wonder if she could get to 6 million.

Taylor really hasn't had a calendar-year-dominating album like this before, and it goes back to what I was talking about a few weeks ago with release timing. Because she's usually released in the fall, her numbers tend to be split across two years.

 

I don't think so, but American country music generally isn't that big abroad. He is, easily, the biggest country crossover success since Taylor, though, so you might be hearing him sooner rather than later.

 

I've heard a fair bit of Zach Bryan around recently which surprised me.

 

he's 100000x better

 

Well, he actually has talent.

 

And has huge crossover possibilities.

 

I'll be very interested to see how big he can get, because he definitely does not have a pop sound at all.

 

No but it helps that he leans more "Americana" than "Fuck yeah America".

 

I don't listen to a ton of ZB, but can appreciate him for being closer to the new-ish wave of outlaw country (Sturgill, Isbell (debatable I know), Childers, Stapleton) than pop country. My impression of MW is he is Florida Georgia Line in a shiny new wrapper.

EDIT: also I haven't heard a lot of MW either, which is wild, because I live in ALABAMA. I think it just goes to show how easy it is to not be tuned in with what is "popular" if you aren't actively trying to seek that out.