2014 has been a down year for record sales, and that is putting it lightly. While the industry has been moving toward streaming as computer technology heads up into the cloud, 2014 was poised to not have a platinum album released. In steps the music industry's pop/country queen bee Taylor Swift to the rescue, who not only beat expectations for what her first-week album sales would be with 1989, but absolutely crushed them. She is the first artist to sell 1 million albums in 2014.
As per Swift, industry experts predicted she would move 650,000 copies in the first week, but she almost doubled that mark. According to Billboard, she shot her way up to the top of the Billboard Top 200 chart with an astounding 1.287 million copies sold.
Music industry execs, you can sleep easy tonight. The second highest number this year came from Coldplay at 745,000 albums sold, according to radio.com. This is the second highest sales week for an album since Enimen's The Eminem Show in 2002, which sold 1.322 million, said Billboard.
Swift's not the only album to sell 1 million copies in calendar year 2014, though. As we previously reported, the Frozen soundtrack has been doing gangbusters this year, selling more than 3 million copies and continuing to sell. But for albums that began sales in 2014, Swift is the only one to go platinum. The existential crisis of music downloads has been averted for now, but that does not mean we will not be staring down this barrel at some point again next year.
Albums from major pop stars seem to be the ones that have the best chance of garnering the coveted platinum status, and that threshold for an artist is getting higher each year. Maybe it is time for the industry to start looking into handing out awards for number of streams on a song. There is no way to compare this to past record sales pre-streaming, but it would be a sign that the major industry players are looking forward and integrating new technology instead of dwelling in the past with Walkmans and physical CDs.
A video posted by Taylor Swift (@taylorswift) on Nov 11, 2014 at 7:55pm PST
