Yahoo Music - Chart Watch

It’s official: Taylor Swift’s 1989 sold 1,287,000 copies in its first week. That’s the biggest one-week tally since Eminem’s The Eminem Show sold 1,322,000 copies in its first full week in June 2002. Swift is the first artist to top the 1 million mark in weekly sales with three albums since Nielsen SoundScan began tracking music sales in 1991.

Those factoids will be everywhere in the next couple of days. Here are seven facts about Swift and her album that you won’t read everywhere else.

1. Each of Swift’s five studio albums has sold more in its first week than the one that preceded it. Red sold 1,208,000 copies in its first week in October 2012. Speak Now sold 1,047,000 copies in its first week in October 2010. Fearless opened with sales of 592,000 copies in November 2008. Taylor Swift started with sales of 39,000 in October 2006.

2. This is Swift’s second album in a row to sell 1.2 million copies in its first week. Swift is one of just three acts—and the only woman—to sell 1.2 million copies in one week with two different albums. The first two were *NSYNC (No Strings Attached, Celebrity) and Eminem (The Marshall Mathers LP, The Eminem Show).

3. Swift now has the second and third highest one-week sales tallies by a female artist. Britney Spears remains on top with her sophomore album Oops!…I Did It Again, which sold 1,319,000 copies in its first week in May 2000.

4. 1989 is the fourth album to sell 1 million copies in one week since 2010. The first three were Speak Now and Red and Lady Gaga’s discount-aided Born This Way. Here’s the part that may surprise you: More albums have sold 1 million copies in one week in the 2010s than did so in the 1990s. Just three albums hit the 1M mark in weekly sales in that decade: Whitney Houston’s The Bodyguard soundtrack, Garth Brooks’s Double Live and Backstreet Boys’s Millennium. The million-unit-first-week phenomenon really exploded in the 2000s, when 12 albums achieved the feat.

5. 1989 has achieved the second biggest sales week in digital history. It trails only Born This Way, which sold 662K digital copies in its first week in May 2011. (Billboard reported at the time that 440K of those albums were sold for 99 cents in Amazon’s MP3 store.)

6. 1989 also debuts at #1 on the U.K.’s Official Albums Chart. It’s Swift’s studio album in a row to become a transatlantic #1. She’s one of only three female artists to land two transatlantic #1 albums so far in the 2010s. She follows Katy Perry and Lady Gaga. (Susan Boyle came close, but I Dreamed A Dream ended its run at #1 in the U.K. in the last week of 2009.)

7. Swift has achieved so much in her career that it’s interesting to remember one of the few awards or accomplishments that eluded her—the Grammy for Best New Artist. She was nominated, but lost to Amy Winehouse. Winehouse, who was talented and troubled in equal measure, died of alcohol poisoning in July 2011. Swift, who is among the most laser-focused artists in pop history, goes from triumph to triumph.

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