Yes

Did buddy bring up HUT out of thin air or am I missing something

Midzy did to try to bait him

The human mind cannot fully comprehend how insane 4 million first week is

I'd say what the human mind really can't comprehend is how someone can go from selling 4M units of an album in week 1 to selling less than 400,000 units of that same album in week 2.

i explained it earlier today

TLDR: the vast majority of those millions sold were online preorders, and those all got shipped out on week 1. Week 2 sales are just people picking up CDs at their local stores and obviously there aren’t a lot of folks doing that nowadays.

It’s elegantly simplistic, actually.

More like majority of the Taylor Swift fans who bought the album in its first week bought way more versions than they needed to buy, just so they could boost up her numbers to hit than 4M mark and now, because there's no real interest from the GP in buying physical versions of the album, its pure sales have crashed historically from over 3.5M units to 100k units in the span of 1 week.

I mean, you’re actually saying what I’ve just said albeit with more negatively charged words.

Everybody knows full well that there aren’t many any non-diehard fans who are still willing to buy physicals anymore, so an 100k in week2 is not just not awkward (like many tried to imply), it is in fact logical and expected.

(In fact, 100k pure in week 2 is astronomical in big 2025. I don’t think anyone else is selling close to that much lol).

Nobody is questioning that Taylor's numbers are impressive. What people are calling out are the tactics she employed to reach those numbers, how unsustainable they are (hence the massive second week drop in pure sales) and how as a result of that, they aren't an organic representative of how much of a commercial force she actually is right now.

This "record," as impactful and significant as it's supposed to be, doesn't feel like that because more than ever before, people know the shenanigans Taylor had to pull to get them. They know how many versions of her album she had to make available for purchase, day after day during the first tracking week, so outside of her own fanbase (and yes, that includes the sycophants she has who are also critics and journalists), no one gives a f*** about this record.

When 25 broke the record 10 years ago, I wasn't even keeping tabs on charts like I do today but even I felt the impact and 10 years ago, I was the furthest away from the pop music space. It wasn't just 250,000 enthusiastic Adele fans buying the album, it was literally millions of people all around the world buying the album. Hello, as a lead single, felt inescapable. You don't get any of that from The Life of a Showgirl. Even The Tortured Poets Department and it's massive debut didn't feel significant and the more Taylor relies on emotionally manipulating her fanbase to buy more and more copies of her albums to give her bigger and bigger debut weeks, the less significant those records will be and the less invested the GP will feel about her success because it'll become more clear as time passes that they have nothing to do with it.

ice spice now french montana/Nav tier

Great write-up:

Song is fire though

Sample carring

Buy This Album. Now Buy It in Green.

get up @kasich2028

You’re overthinking this a bit, people that care about this chart stuff will check out the charts and see Taylor is #1 and that’s the end of story

Or maybe more precisely, they went to check out the chart of the week, and billboard happens to mention the top record is Taylor’s 4M (they mention the record all the time whenever a number is big). And then T swift’s record will be spread in perpetuity and there is nothing anybody can do to break it. It’s so cool if you think about it

Gud thing I don’t buy physical albums ever

Where did this hardcore Swiftie even come from

They jumped from the rafters WWE style when Showgirl dropped and has been dominant ever since.

I know it's cool. I'm also here for records being broken. I have no issues with Taylor owning the record btw, I just wish she didn't get it in the way she did but whatever, I guess.

I'll never understand why some artists do s*** like this. One has to ask, to what end?