Five Reasons Why Taylor Swift Was Able to Make Chart History With Her ‘Midnights’ Debut Week
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There might not be a clean sweep in the MLB World Series this week — not after the Philadelphia Phillies and Houston Astros split the first two games of their best-of-seven matchup over the weekend — but there is one in the Billboard Hot 100‘s top 10. For the first time in the chart’s 64-plus-year history, all 10 spots in the chart’s highest tier belong to just one lead artist: Taylor Swift, who occupies the whole region with tracks from her new album, the Oct. 21-released Midnights.
The records for most simultaneous top 10 hits and most top 10 hits off the same album had been set originally by such artists as The Beatles (all of the top five at once in 1964) and Michael Jackson (seven top 10 hits from Thriller from 1982-84). But both marks were broken last year by one of Swift’s primary rivals for 21st-century chart dominance: Drake commanded nine of the top 10 spots on the Hot 100 dated Sept. 18, 2021, with the release of his much-anticipated Certified Lover Boy album. Just a little over a year later, the two records now turn over to Swift — and this time, they can only ever be tied, never bettered.
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The achievements are just two of many notched by Swift this week, as she also moved a staggering 1.578 million equivalent album units of Midnights, according to Luminate — the largest first-week number of her career, and second only to Adele’s 25 (3.38 million in 2015) for any artist in the streaming era, since the Billboard 200 switched from a pure sales to equivalent-album model in December 2014. That also includes 575,000 in vinyl sales, a number that triples the previous weekly record (set earlier this year by Harry Styles’ Harry’s House with 182,000).
How was Swift able to crash the charts in such historic fashion this week, 16 years into her professional career? Let’s examine some of the factors below.
1. The culmination of a quarter-decade’s good will and smart decisions. At the turn of the decade, Taylor Swift’s stats were still mighty, but trending in the wrong direction: reputation‘s first-week number of 1.238 million in 2017 represented a slight dip from the 1.287 million units moved by 1989 in its first week in 2014, while 2019’s Lover became her first album since 2008 sophomore set Fearless to miss the million mark, moving 867,000 units. (It was also her first album since 2010’s Speak Now not to generate a Hot 100 No. 1, with lead singles “ME!” and “You Need to Calm Down” both peaking at No. 2.) The sets drew mostly positive reviews, but neither was received as rapturously as 1989 or 2012’s Red.
Swift’s first release of the new decade, 2020’s surprise-announced indie-folk swerve Folklore, didn’t totally reverse these trends — its first-week number of 846,000 was slightly lower than Lover‘s — but it did alter her overall momentum, drawing her strongest reviews and fan response since 1989 (as well as her first album of the year Grammy win since that set). Evermore, released later that year as something of a complement to Folklore, drew much smaller numbers of 329,000 but also positive reviews and another AOTY nod — and the twin LPs proved enduring, topping the Billboard 200 albums chart for a combined 12 weeks, where Lover reigned for just its debut week. (Both also produced Hot 100 No. 1s, in “Cardigan” and “Willow,” respectively.)
Then in 2021, Swift further gratified fans with the first two releases from her long-promised Taylor’s Version series, re-recording her first six studio albums in order to claim full ownership over them. While the project initially seemed to have limited commercial potential, Swift turned the releases into nostalgia bombs, not only fascinating fans with the re-recorded soundalikes of tracks from Fearless and Red, but also revisiting previously unearthed rarities and gems; most notably, her 10-minute version of fan favorite deep cut “All Too Well” not only became one of 2021’s most critically celebrated releases but even debuted atop the Hot 100. Consequently, the albums became mini-blockbusters all over again: Red (Taylor’s Version) debuted with 605,000 first-week units, better than the first week of any original album in 2021 outside of Certified Lover Boy and Adele’s 30.
And all of this 2020s success (Swift was even picked by the Billboard editorial staff as the Greatest Pop Star of 2021) had come without her releasing a proper new album in the mainstream pop mode fans had long expected from her. So when that finally did come this month, in the form of the Midnights album — harkening back to the alt-leaning synth-pop sound cultivated by Swift (and regular collaborators like writer/producer Jack Antonoff) from 1989 to Lover — it exploded with the anticipation built up over two and a half years’ worth of well-received detours, almost as if this was her first official LP release of the decade.
2. The perfect balance of surprise and hype. Swift’s last decade has been a fascinating case study in the benefits and drawbacks of the traditional extended rollout versus the newer-model sneak-release. Part of the reason that 2020’s Folklore announcement came as such a shock to the industry was that Swift had previously been such a staunch supporter of the months-long lead-up to an album, with a traditional lead single and music video, a blitz of public appearances and award show performances, and enough headlines to ensure everyone in the world knew she had a new album imminent. But when that approach backfired somewhat with the lukewarmly received lead single to Lover (the bombastic, Brendon Urie-featuring “ME!”) and the old-school media onslaught making her look slightly out of touch with the pace of pop in the streaming age, it was pretty clear something had to change.
But rather than keep with the Folklore and Evermore approach of only announcing her new albums the week of release, Swift split the difference with her Midnights drop. She announced the album months in advance, at August’s MTV Video Music Awards — where, incidentally, she also picked up three awards (including video of the year) for her “All Too Well (The Short Film)” — but never released an advance single for it. Instead, she unveiled other elements from the album: themes, images, song titles, treating each morsel of new information like a piece of the puzzle that would eventually be revealed in full with the LP’s release. And once the album did drop, she kept one more major surprise in reserve: the album’s 3am Edition, a pack of seven extra songs to further delight ravenous fans (and boost streaming totals).
The end result was a masterful balancing act between the strategies of Old Taylor and New Taylor, hyping the album with enough advance notice to get the music world raring for its release — and to properly prep the kind of physical volume of vinyl and CDs necessary to produce these kinds of blockbuster sales numbers — while also keeping enough secrets about it hidden to maintain the mystery, and not overwhelming prospective listeners before they even got a chance to hit play.
3. The unavoidable first single. Though she may be a singer-songwriter at heart, Taylor Swift is also a savvy enough pop star to know that no matter how much critical acclaim you amass, no matter how coherent your albums are as full-length statements, and no matter how much general good will you can claim as an artist — if you wanna stay a true pop star, every once in a while you gotta give the people an undeniably killer pop single. (Just ask Beyoncé.)
Swift didn’t lead Midnights with an advance single this time out, but it was still very clear within the first day of the album’s release what the first hit from it was going to be. “Anti-Hero” not only came with its own ambitious music video, Thursday Night Football promo and TikTok-geared #TSAntiHeroChallenge, but with a wallop of a chorus whose meme potential was unmistakable from first listen: “It’s me, hi/ I’m the problem, it’s me.” “Anti-Hero” was immediately and equally embraced by the internet and by pop radio — becoming ubiquitous in references on Twitter and Instagram and debuting at No. 13 on Billboard‘s Radio Songs tally this week, her highest-ever entrance on the chart.
It’s no surprise that “Anti-Hero” is the top debut from Midnights on the Hot 100 this week, but it also played a part in the rest of Swift’s chart dominance by doing the things that huge lead singles are supposed to do: Worming its way into all facets of pop culture, getting irremovably stuck in your head, and making sure that even your great aunts and uncles know that Taylor Swift Is Back.
4. The era advantages. As we did with Drake’s 2021 takeover, it’s important to point out that while Swift’s chart impact this week is jaw-dropping, it doesn’t necessarily mean that she’s actually more popular than The Beatles or Michael Jackson were at their peaks. Rather, she has advantages built-in to competing on the charts in 2022 that those pop icons simply didn’t at their respective commercial peaks, back when songs needed to be specifically released and promoted as singles to even be eligible for the Hot 100. Those rules were eliminated in 1998, but it wasn’t until the rise of iTunes the next decade — and even more so, the beginning of streaming in the 2010s — that an album’s tracks could be consumed individually enough for it to potentially chart every song at once in its first week.
And what’s more, as popular music continues to get more and more diffuse, megastars like Swift and Drake have a greater opportunity every year to monopolize the top tier of charts like the Hot 100. The primary competition for the 13 tracks on Midnights this week came via Sam Smith and Kim Petras’ “Unholy” and Steve Lacy’s “Bad Habit,” two viral tracks from artists with little recent Hot 100 success — only Smith has any real history there, and they hadn’t scored higher than No. 39 with a single this decade — and whose peaks at radio, streaming and sales are unlikely to totally overlap. As the annual volume of four-quadrant smashes produced in pop keeps dwindling, it only gets easier for an artist of Swift’s size and reach to just come in and immediately command the whole room.
5. The last-second push. Of course, it also never hurts to give a couple of your tracks a little bit of an extra boost, as Swift did on Thursday (Oct. 27) — the last day of the tracking week — by making the original and instrumental versions of “Bejeweled” and “Question…?” available on her webstore for 69 cents. The move helped the two songs become two of the set’s best-sellers for the week (“Question…?” leads this week’s entire Digital Song Sales chart), and further helped ensure the top 10 Hot 100 placement for both songs, which rank at No. 6 and No. 7 this week, respectively — though indeed, streams for Swift’s songs in the Hot 100’s top 10 ended up being strong enough that all 10 tracks would’ve ranked in the region even without any chart points from sales or radio airplay.
