Taylor Swift’s Lover is Number One on the Rolling Stone Top 200 Albums Chart this week — out-selling every other release on the chart by a factor of more than ten to one.
Lover topped out close to a million with 991,800 album units for the latest tracking week of August 23rd, 2019 to August 29th, 2019. The album, which came out on the 23rd, garnered around 715,000 units in album sales, around 120,000 units in song sales, and around 216 million streams. The albums that occupied the Number Two and Number Three spots on RS 200 — Young Thug’s So Much Fun, which topped last week’s chart, and Jeezy’s TM104: The Legend of the Snowman, respectively — pulled in 78,000 album-equivalent units and 42,000 units.
Swift’s colossal sales week was pretty much guaranteed in advance. She unveiled a formidable series of ad campaigns leading up to Lover‘s release: a Capital One partnership featuring a commercial and a t-shirt-album-bundle for those who have Capital One cards; a deal with Spotify, in which Swift shared audio messages and stories behind her songs on the platform; a deal with YouTube Music that involved a livestream event and a video premiere; a deal with iHeartMedia in which the radio conglomerate’s Top 40, Adult Contemporary, and “Hot AC” stations, 135 in total, all blasted Swift’s new music every hour on the hour; an Amazon deal where an image of Swift appeared on packaging for whatever you happened to order; and a deal with Target, which carried four different deluxe versions of Lover.
The Rolling Stone 200 Albums chart tracks the most popular releases of the week in the United States. Entries are ranked by album units, a number that combines digital and physical album sales, digital song sales, and audio streams using a custom weighting system. The chart does not include passive listening such as terrestrial radio or digital radio. The Rolling Stone 200 Albums chart is updated daily, and each week Rolling Stone finalizes and publishes an official version of the chart, covering the seven-day period ending with the previous Thursday.
Though Swift’s Lover has dominated the news cycle for days on end, other artists also put out new albums on August 23rd. Some of these releases enjoyed modestly successful opening weeks: Brockhampton’s Ginger, Midland’s Let It Roll, and Missy Elliott’s Iconology all debuted in the Top 25 on the RS 200.