Taylor Swift clearly knows how to make music, but she also really knows how to sell it. Now that the dust is settling on 2022, some year-end sales numbers that show this are starting to surface. For instance, the 2.928 million albums she sold last year were nearly triple that of the artist in second place: Harry Styles, with 1.06 million. It turns out she similarly crushed the vinyl market, too.
Billboard reports that Swift sold 1.695 million vinyl records across her entire catalog of releases, according to Luminate’s year-end report. For reference, that’s more than the next two biggest artists combined: Styles with 719,000 and The Beatles with 553,000. Here’s another way to contextualize Swift’s sales success: One of every 25 vinyl records sold in 2022 was by Swift (more specifically, she had 1.695 million of 43.46 million total vinyl albums sold by all artists, or 3.9 percent).
She also had six of the year’s top 40 vinyl albums: Midnights (at No. 1 with 945,000 sales); Folklore (No. 7, 174,000); Red (Taylor’s Version) (No. 11, 153,000); Evermore (No. 14, 134,000); Fearless (Taylor’s Version) (No. 30, 97,000); and Lover (No. 36, 91,000). In that metric, Styles and Kendrick Lamar are tied for second with three top-4 albums apiece.
Lamar, by the way, had the year’s best-selling hip-hop album on vinyl, but it wasn’t 2022’s Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers like might be expected.
