TAYLOR SHATTERS SALES RECORDS WITH MILLION-SELLING DEBUT

With 1,046,718 copies sold in the US in the first week of release, Taylor Swift’s Speak Now album has scored SoundScan’s biggest single-week sales total since 2005 and is the biggest debuting country studio album in history.

Speak Now accounted for 18% of total albums sold this week, setting a new record for percentage of total sales in a single week. One out of every five CDs or download sales this week was Taylor’s Speak Now album, which was released on Big Machine Records.

Speak Now is just the 16th album in the SoundScan era to sell over a million copies in one week, and Taylor joins Whitney Houston, Norah Jones and Britney Spears as the only female artists in history to sell more than a million albums in a debut week. With 278,000 digital albums sold, Taylor broke her own record for most country digital albums sold in one week (set by 2008’s Fearless album), and Speak Now marked the largest debut album release total (all genres) at Target in the history of the retail chain. Taylor, who earlier this year won four Grammys –including Album of the Year– for Fearless, wrote the Speak Now album entirely by herself, and co-produced the project with Nathan Chapman.

Speak Now reached the iTunes #1 album position (all genres) within an hour of its release on October 25th, and the album’s lead single, “Mine,” is now Taylor’s sixth #1 hit, jumping from #5 to #1 at Country radio this week. “Mine” has reached #11 at Top 40 radio and is Top 5 at A/C and Top 10 at Hot A/C. The video for “Mine” is in its 10th week at #1 on CMT, and has also reached #1 at GAC, MTV and VH1.

The Speak Now track “Mean” is this week‘s Hot Shot Debut on the Billboard Hot 100, marking the third straight week Taylor has held Hot Shot Debut honors. Taylor is the only artist in the 52-year history of the Hot 100 to achieve this feat. And just last month, Taylor set a new Billboard record for Most Top 10 debuts on the all-genre Hot 100 in the history of the chart.