Taylor Swift is directly responsible for the record-breaking year that US vinyl sales saw in 2022: out of just under 43.5million LPs, one in 25 bought were albums minted by the pop megastar.
According to Luminate‘s year-end sales report, Swift sold a total of 1.695million vinyl records in 2022 – more than the second- and third-highest sellers, Harry Styles and The Beatles, combined. For reference, those artists respectively sold 719,000 and 553,000 records.
Most of Swift’s record sales are owed to her recent 10th studio album ‘Midnights’, which sold 945,000 copies across five colour-coded variants. Last month, it was reported that sales figures for ‘Midnights’ made Swift the first mainstream artist to sell more copies of an album on vinyl than CD since the 1980s.
Not only is ‘Midnights’ the highest-selling vinyl release in more than three decades, but is the highest selling vinyl album of the 21st century overall. By proxy, 2022 was the first year since 1987 that vinyl records sold better than CDs.
‘Midnights’ earned a four-star review from NME’s Hannah Mylrea, and the album was recently labelled the 12th best of 2022 in NME‘s list of the year’s 50 best albums. Swift will tour it across North America over the bulk of this year, with a UK run set to be announced in the coming months.
