In the diminished world of the music business, where album sales have plunged by more than 50 percent in the last decade, genuine blockbusters are an endangered species. But this week the recording industry got a rare bit of good news with the unmitigated triumph of Taylor Swift’s “Speak Now.”
The album, the third and latest by Ms. Swift — still a month shy of her 21st birthday — sold 1,047,000 copies in the United States in its first week, according to Nielsen SoundScan, making it the fastest-selling new record in five years. It is also the first to get opening-week sales of a million since Lil Wayne’s “Tha Carter III,” which squeezed over the line in 2008 with 1,006,000.
On Wednesday, after several days of uncharacteristic silence on her Twitter feed, Ms. Swift wrote to her 4.5 million followers: “I ...Can’t... Believe ... This ... You guys have absolutely lit up my world. Thank you.”
Selling a million records in one week has always been big news; according to Billboard it has happened only 16 times since 1991. But Ms. Swift’s tally was orders of magnitude greater than anything else now in stores. Last week “Speak Now” sold more than the next 61 titles on the chart combined, and almost 11 times more than its nearest competitor, Sugarland’s “Incredible Machine” (Mercury Nashville), which had 89,000. “Speak Now” accounted for 18 percent of all album sales last week, and individual tracks from it have been downloaded 2.5 million times.
Ms. Taylor’s success has capped a notable year for country music, with a streak of recent No. 1’s on the Billboard album chart and Lady Antebellum’s “Need You Now” the second-best seller of the year so far. But as many in the music industry see it, “Speak Now” proves that Ms. Swift has transcended the limitations of genre and become a pop megastar, period, with even apparent setbacks — like Kanye West’s outburst at the MTV Video Music Awards last year — ultimately working to expand her celebrity.
“Her songwriting appeals to the broadest demo of music buyers right now: teens,” said Ken Ehrlich, the longtime producer of the Grammy Awards. “And she’s incredibly positive and nonthreatening. Having Kanye confront her added millions of people on her side, even people who didn’t see the incident on MTV but saw it repeated endlessly after the show.”
Ms. Swift deserves most of the credit for her success of course. This year she won four Grammys, including album of the year, and critics have mostly praised her new album, calling it canny, catchy country-pop about growing up in public. A master blogger and Twitterer, she has established herself as a prime star for the social media age.
“She’s writing her life story with a series of songs, carrying us from her teenage years into her 20s,” said Jim Donio, president of the National Association of Recording Merchandisers, which represents music retailers. “She has made herself accessible, utilizing all the tools of the modern marketplace. It’s an interesting creative story and an interesting marketing story.”
To promote the album Ms. Swift’s label, Big Machine, had an extensive and high-profile marketing campaign, parts of which were in the works for as long as two years, said Scott Borchetta, the label’s president. Target offered a deluxe version of the album at its stores, supporting it with television commercials, and she held a literacy event that was broadcast to 25,000 classrooms. Last week Ms. Swift blitzed through the network TV talk shows, gave a private performance for contest winners that was broadcast online, and even played a semiprivate show at a JetBlue terminal at Kennedy International Airport in New York.
In an interview on Tuesday, as news of the album’s sales spread through the industry, Mr. Borchetta praised both his marketing plan and his artist. “It’s one thing to have a plan,” he said. “But we have the artist and the music to back it up.”
Perhaps the clearest sign that the music industry as a whole — and Nashville in particular — has embraced Ms. Swift as a new force to be reckoned with is that competing record labels have scheduled a wave of high-profile country releases for the last few months of the year, hoping that some of the popularity of “Speak Now” will rub off.
This week Brad Paisley released a hits collection, next week comes a new one from Reba McEntire, and the week after brings two more big country names, Keith Urban and Rascal Flatts (also on Big Machine). In recent weeks, much-awaited titles by Sugarland, the Zac Brown Band and Toby Keith have also come out.
“The reality is, when you have a hit album, it brings people into the stores,” said David Ross, editor and publisher of the country trade magazine Music Row. “When the traffic is going to grow, you want to be there.”
How long Ms. Swift can dominate the chart, though, is unclear. Healthy numbers are predicted for the new Susan Boyle album, out on Tuesday, and on Nov. 22 there are great expectations for Ms. Swift’s old nemesis: Kanye West.
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