charts discussion HDD: "1989 (Taylor's Version)" 1,586,516; beats Midnights, 10 albums top 40

[liquiddiamonds]

I don’t understand why Taylor is singled out regarding her physical copies. Everyone with a fanbase is playing the variations game for pure sales. It’s the only way to make records attractive investments in 2023. If you don’t make it special, fans will otherwise just stream it (in lossless quality even). So you add collectibles, a nice album cover, an alternate cover, vinyl colors, etc Lorde was selling an empty box with pictures and her base ate it up. Swifities are just very dedicated consumers. I don’t even think the high first week sales are the biggest evidence, but the actual consistency of it. In a calendar year they bought three different Taylor projects and show up for her. Most fanbases would skip the following album in such short span lol Why is this feat subjected to critique? I would understand for environmental reasons, like let’s extinguish physicals and go all digital (it’s why i just buy old second hand records and not new), but I’ll never get how this is a stan drag when people have been collecting records since the 50s and success is measured by it

[BabyBenzz]

the whole pre-order not shipping thing is making me anxious lmao wtf is happening.. 

[Frozen99]

never have i seen such a confusion about pre-orders, has she stopped sharing stats altogether along with no box-office scores or her tour?  

[byzantium]

1 hour ago, liquiddiamonds said:

I don’t understand why Taylor is singled out regarding her physical copies. Everyone with a fanbase is playing the variations game for pure sales. It’s the only way to make records attractive investments in 2023. If you don’t make it special, fans will otherwise just stream it (in lossless quality even). So you add collectibles, a nice album cover, an alternate cover, vinyl colors, etc Lorde was selling an empty box with pictures and her base ate it up. Swifities are just very dedicated consumers. I don’t even think the high first week sales are the biggest evidence, but the actual consistency of it. In a calendar year they bought three different Taylor projects and show up for her. Most fanbases would skip the following album in such short span lol Why is this feat subjected to critique? I would understand for environmental reasons, like let’s extinguish physicals and go all digital (it’s why i just buy old second hand records and not new), but I’ll never get how this is a stan drag when people have been collecting records since the 50s and success is measured by it

It’s really just because there is a group of people who per se do not like her, and they struggle with the cognitive dissonance of seeing her be so successful despite them not liking her.  So they latch onto anything, no matter how illogical, which can help resolve that cognitive dissonance.  

[Squall]

There is no reason it’s doing barely more than SN. It has more supports and is clearly way more anticipated than SN so there is something fishy.  

[Holiest Dreams]

Well it was 100% confirmed all the way back in August that this had already sold 240K CDs, 150K standard vinyls and 150K Sunrise Blvd vinyls before they disabled the feature that allowed fans to track sales  and obviously it sold way way way more than those 540K pre-orders including the other variants, Target CDs and several restocks. 
 

Who knows what’s going on with the pre-order situation… I doubt anything, they just haven’t reported on it yet. But it’s physically impossible for the 550K number to include pre-orders… just saying.

[liquiddiamonds]

51 minutes ago, byzantium said:

It’s really just because there is a group of people who per se do not like her, and they struggle with the cognitive dissonance of seeing her be so successful despite them not liking her.  So they latch onto anything, no matter how illogical, which can help resolve that cognitive dissonance.  

Basically. And I’m absolutely certain if we were to count unique listeners she would still be the point out of the curve in the music industry. She’s smashing in every metric existent 

[Feanor]

The discrepancy between HDD and Billboard is really quite weird. Perched for the HDD update later today.

[Cloröx]

14 hours ago, Michael196 said:

While this is really dumb, it means that this is already locked for 2024’s year-end #1 
 

 

 

Unless she releases TS11 

[Steve Johnson]

1 hour ago, Holiest Dreams said:

Well it was 100% confirmed all the way back in August that this had already sold 240K CDs, 150K standard vinyls and 150K Sunrise Blvd vinyls before they disabled the feature that allowed fans to track sales  and obviously it sold way way way more than those 540K pre-orders including the other variants, Target CDs and several restocks.

That twitter swiftie who was tracking preorders is now making excuses. 

[omrimayo]

2 minutes ago, Steve Johnson said:

That twitter swiftie who was tracking preorders is now making excuses. 

So we were fools all this time?

[Buffy]

It’s selling 500k. *gulps* Speak Now is her best album of all time confirmed 

[Squall]

9 minutes ago, omrimayo said:

So we were fools all this time?

No. We did have numbers, just like Midnights.

[omrimayo]

Just now, Squall said:

No. We did have numbers, just like Midnights.

So you still think HDD was the right number?

[Squall]

2 minutes ago, omrimayo said:

So you still think HDD was the right number?

I don't know anymore, maybe they just didn't send the orders  

[Steve Johnson]

Speak Now TV, you did absolutely amazing. SN doing 716k, will 1989 even cross that? 

[skizzo]

Sorry but I dont believe this album will sell 200k in the UK and barely does triple that in the US... something is not adding up

Edited October 31, 2023 by skizzo

[byzantium]

3 minutes ago, skizzo said:

Sorry but I dont believe this album will sell 200k in the UK and barely does triple that in the US... something is not adding up

Yeah.  I’m with you.  I simply do not believe that 1989 will struggle to beat Speak Now.  Based on the Spotify numbers, there is much more enthusiasm for this album, and 1989 is by far her biggest, most well known album.  Something is amiss.  (Also, for anecdotal evidence I bought 1989 (TV) but not SN (TV)) 

Edited October 31, 2023 by byzantium

[TaylorNation]

maybe she’s just laundering her money 

[Squall]

12 minutes ago, skizzo said:

Sorry but I dont believe this album will sell 200k in the UK and barely does triple that in the US... something is not adding up

Exactly  

[Taylena]

16 hours ago, Gaia said:

Her sales are impressive but she’s essentially a Kpop artist.

Kpop groups that are selling as much physical albums as Taylor, sometimes even outselling her by millions of copies, but at the same time these groups can't pull more than 10 million streams for the debut day of their albums. It's such a bad faith argument to claim Taylor's music consumption is akin to kpop artist while she keeps beating and establishing new streaming records that even "organic" artists without physical sales can't touch. But i look forward to someday a kpop group touching the mark of 150M+ streams in a day on Spotify. 

[Squall]

9 minutes ago, Taylena said:

Kpop groups that are selling as much physical albums as Taylor, sometimes even outselling her by millions of copies, but at the same time these groups can't pull more than 10 million streams for the debut day of their albums. It's such a bad faith argument to claim Taylor's music consumption is akin to kpop artist while she keeps beating and establishing new streaming records that even "organic" artists without physical sales can't touch. But i look forward to someday a kpop group touching the mark of 150M+ streams in a day on Spotify. 

Aren't they also super frontloaded? Because it's clearly not Taylor's case  

[Shendelzare]

ya'll still give that OTH the time of day? 

[IBeMe]

Maybe releasing 1989 TV so close after Speak Now TV is causing some sort of backlog issues / manufacturing issues. I know ppl say they can track their vinyl being in the warehouse or being shipped but what if the ones that are marked as still being in the warehouse have yet to be made altogether! A disaster

[Steve Johnson]

26 minutes ago, IBeMe said:

Maybe releasing 1989 TV so close after Speak Now TV is causing some sort of backlog issues / manufacturing issues. I know ppl say they can track their vinyl being in the warehouse or being shipped but what if the ones that are marked as still being in the warehouse have yet to be made altogether! A disaster

Yeah good point.