Taylor Swift continues to rewrite the record book with The Life of a Showgirl.
It’s her 15th album to top the Billboard 200 and it achieved the feat with record-breaking numbers. She’s now the solo artist with the most No. 1 albums in history, after breaking out of a tie with Drake and Jay-Z.
🎬 SIGN UP for Parade’s Daily newsletter to get the latest pop culture news & celebrity interviews delivered right to your inbox 🎬
She’s Only Second to the Beatles for Most Career No. 1 Albums
Swift now has the second most No. 1 albums of all-time, behind only the Beatles, who have 19 No. 1 albums dating back to when the album chart began publishing regularly in 1956, according to Billboard.
With the chart-topping debut of The Life of a Showgirl, all of Swift’s studio albums and rerecorded efforts from her second album, 2008’s Fearless, through her latest effort, have debuted at the top of the Billboard 200.
The Life of a Showgirl did it in astounding fashion with the equivalent of 4.002 million album units (a combination of album sales and streams) in the United States in the week ending Oct. 9, according to Luminate. The figure includes 3,479,500 of pure album sales. Both figures are the biggest weekly totals for an album in pure sales and equivalent units since Luminate (formerly SoundScan), began electronically tabulating chart data in 1991, beginning the modern era of the album chart.
The previous modern-era single-week record holder was Adele’s 25, with 3.482 million total units, including 3.378 million pure albums sales, in November 2025.
No Single-Track Sales
The Life of a Showgirl also set a record in a different way. It was able to rack up those huge numbers without any single-track sales as none of the album’s songs were made available for individual purchase on digital retail services. It’s the first album to top the Billboard 200 without any single-track sales since the magazine began ranking albums by equivalent album units on the chart dated Dec. 13, 2014, Billboard reports.
With 4.002 million first-week equivalent album units, The Life of a Showgirl also debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s Top Album Sales and Top Streaming Albums charts. The pure album sales, which tallies physical and digital sales of the album, totaled 3,479,500, while the streaming equivalent units totaled 522,600, which equal 680.9 million on-demand official streams of songs on the album.
The success of the album comes in the middle of a media blitz by Swift that began with her film Taylor Swift: The Official Release Party of a Showgirl screening in movie theaters over the weekend of Oct. 3-5 and topping the box office charts in the U.S. and Canada. That was followed by the release of the music video for the album’s first single, “The Fate of Ophelia,” on Oct. 5, and TV interviews on NBC’s The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon (Oct. 6) and Late Night with Seth Meyers (Oct. 8).
