TAY’S FORTHCOMING DEBUT: WE ARE TORTURED BY SPECULATION

As we’ve been endlessly reminding you, Taylor Swift’s new album, THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT, is going to be big. Very big. Enormously big. Perhaps even frighteningly big.

But how big? Industry handicappers are fraying the beads on their abacuses estimating the Republic set’s likely first week. Is it a lock to hit 1 million, 1.25m, 1.5m or more? Some insiders—who know their data—are speculating about blockbuster opening numbers that we’re not even ready to share with you.

Let’s take a look at first-week and ATD totals for the last four Taylor releases (see below). And while we're doing so, let’s bear in mind that she has only gotten much, much bigger in terms of pop-cultural reach in the last year. The Eras Tour (the biggest ever, likely wrapping with $1.6b), the Eras Tour movie (now streaming on demand), the 1989 (Taylor’s Version) drop and La Swift's Travis-assisted profile in the sports world have injected nitro into what was already the hottest, fastest engine in the marketplace. TORTURED POETS (which arrives on 4/19, but you knew that) is Tay's first album of entirely new material since 2022's Midnights, so that comp should be particularly illuminating.

Swift currently boasts 283m Instagram followers, by the way, so if 1% of those peeps buy a copy of her record in its first week, she will pass the 2m mark. Just sayin’. She also has 99m monthly listeners on Spotify.

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