This week Taylor Swift sets a personal chart record with her album The Tortured Poets Department after fending off the latest challenger: singer-songwriter Zach Bryan.
With 12 weeks at No. 1, Tortured Poets is now the longest-running chart-topper of Swift’s career, exceeding the 11-week totals she had for Fearless (2008) and 1989 (2014). It is the first album to rack up a dozen consecutive times at the top since Morgan Wallen’s One Thing at a Time, which did so last year, and Swift joins rare company in the 68-year history of the Billboard 200 chart.
In the elite group of albums that not only had long consecutive runs at No. 1, but did so from the very first week they came out, Tortured Poets now surpasses Whitney Houston’s 1987 LP Whitney — featuring enduring hits like I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me) and So Emotional — which spent its first 11 weeks at No. 1, and is just shy of Stevie Wonder’s 13 for Songs in the Key of Life in 1976 and 1977.
In its most recent week out, Tortured Poets had the equivalent of 163,000 sales in the United States, including 95 million streams and 90,000 copies sold as a complete package, according to the tracking service Luminate. Since its release in April, the full 31-track album has logged 3 billion streams and had the equivalent of just under 5 million sales in the United States.
The Great American Bar Scene, the new album by Bryan, whose style has been described as Americana, folk, rock and country, was Swift’s latest competitor for the top spot. And the race seemed close, with both artists unleashing some chart-goosing weapons in the closing hours of the tracking period last week. Bryan offered his album at a discounted price, while Swift released another three variants of Tortured Poets as digital downloads.
But Swift triumphed, while The Great American Bar Scene lands at No. 2 with the equivalent of 137,000 sales.
Swift’s most potent weapon may have been her CD fulfillment warehouse. According to Billboard, last week Swift’s webstore restocked seven previously released CD variants of Tortured Poets and shipped them to fans, driving a huge spike in her traditional album sales. Of the 90,000 full albums she sold last week, 67,000 were on CD. (The rest were digital downloads and vinyl LPs.)
Bryan’s greatest disadvantage may have been self-inflicted. Great American was released on July 4, a Thursday — the final tracking day for last week’s chart, where it opened at No. 17 with the equivalent of 32,000 sales — figures that, had the album been released just one day later, just might have sent the album to No. 1 ahead of Tortured Poets. (If there’s one rule of modern chart prognostication, however, it’s never to underestimate Swift.)
Also this week, Wallen’s One Thing at a Time is No. 3, Billie Eilish’s Hit Me Hard and Soft is No. 4 and Chappell Roan’s The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess holds at No. 5.