TAYLOR SWIFT’S Midnights debuts at No.1 with biggest week of the year!
Midnights enters at No.1 with largest sales week since Adele’s 30; Carly Rae Jepsen opens at No.2. Plus: new certifications for Mariah Carey & The 1975!
Taylor Swift scores her sixth consecutive number-one album on the Weekly Top 50 as Midnights debuts with the biggest sales week in almost a year, launching with 277,000 units in its opening frame. The last album to earn a larger sales week was Adele’s 30 which bowed with a record-breaking 650,000 units for the chart dated 29 November 2021.
Swift also nabs her third-biggest debut to date, as Midnights outperforms 2020’s folklore (259,000) and evermore (226,000); only Lover (310,000), and reputation (309,000) performed better in their debuts.
Swift’s chart debuts are as follows:
- 2017, reputation – 309,000
- 2019, Lover – 310,000
- 2020, folklore – 259,000
- 2020, evermore – 226,000
- 2021, Fearless (Taylor’s Version) – 89,000
- 2021, Red (Taylor’s Version) – 108,000
- 2022, Midnights – 277,000
With 277,000 sold, Midnights is officially the fastest-selling album of the year, narrowly topping Harry Styles’s Harry’s House which debuted with 274,000 units for the chart dated 30 May. However, House‘s lofty debut comprised of 238,000 pure sales with 36,000 pre-sales derived from singles released prior to the album, while Swift’s figure is comprised entirely of pure sales as there were no singles released to trailer the album.
With the debut of Midnights, Swift has now spent a whopping thirty-five weeks at the number one spot across her six chart-topping hits. Her longest-running ruler is 2020’s folklore (seventeen weeks), followed by evermore (eleven weeks), and Fearless (Taylor’s Version) (three weeks). reputation, Lover, Red (Taylor’s Version), and Midnights have all spent a single week at the summit.
Swift’s wintery evermore meanwhile bullets at No.5 with 41,000 sold (up 13 percent).
Carly Rae Jepsen achieves her third consecutive Top Five smash as The Loneliest Time premieres at No.2 with 108,000 copies sold – this figure is made up of 65,000 pure sales and a further 43,000 pre-sales.
Jepsen previously sent two albums – Dedicated and Dedicated Side B – to the top of the charts in 2019 and 2020 respectively.
Madonna’s Celebration retreats from its No.2 highpoint to No.3, on sales of 62,000 copies (up 4 percent).
Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark slips 3-4 after eleven weeks in pole position, moving 48,000 copies (down 13 percent). Mitchell’s Hejira also falls from its No.6 best to No.8, with 31,000 sold this week (down 6 percent).
Outside the Top Five: The Kooks’s The Best of … So Far regresses to No.6 from its No.4 highpoint (37,000 sold – down 8 percent); Mariah Carey’s newly-Gold-certified Greatest Hits bullets at its No.7 peak (34,000 units – up 4 percent); and The 1975’s Being Funny in a Foreign Language tumbles 1-9 in its sophomore frame, while also going Gold (27,000 units – down 69 percent).
Adele rounds out the Top Ten this week as seventeen-week-leader 30 drops 8-10 (26,000 sold – down 16 percent).
Onto Next Week: Taylor Swift’s Midnights is currently tracking to sell 125 – 150k units in its sophomore week, which would easily secure a second stay at the top spot.
L.dK Weekly Top 50
Notable Moves in the Weekly Top 50
No.13 – Elvis 30 #1 Hits / Elvis Presley’s posthumous collection departs the Top Ten after twelve weeks in the region – including a one-week stay at the penthouse – falling from No.9 to No.13 with 18,000 copies sold. Elvis has now sold just over 600,000 copies, making it Presley’s first album to be certified Multi-Platinum!
No.15 – The Car / Arctic Monkeys pay their first visit to the Top 50 as their long-awaited comeback record The Car opens with a lower-than-expected 17,000 units. Car had been expected to sell over 30,000 in its opening week, which would have secured a Top 10 spot this week.
No.19 – Red (Taylor’s Version) / Adding to Swift’s momentous week, her late-2021 re-recording of 2012’s Red rose to No.19 (15,000 sold) increasing its lifetime sales to 904,000 in the process. Red is Swift’s fifth album to sell at least 900,000.
No.23 – The Hissing of Summer Lawns / Joni Mitchell’s 1975 jazz-flavoured piece sink 17-23 after peaking at No.14 two weeks ago, selling 12,000 copies. Despite this, the album has now become Mitchell’s latest Silver-certified hit.
L.dK Weekly Top Artists
Note
Certifications: Silver (60,000); Gold (100,000); Platinum (300,000); Multi-Platinum (600,000 etc.); Diamond (3,000,000).
L.dK Music 