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Taylor Swift’s ‘Red’ Eyes Potential Platinum Debut Week

Taylor Swift at 'Good Morning America'

Taylor Swift is selling music like it’s the ’90s. New album Red, which came out yesterday, is on target for potential first-week album sales of a million copies or more, according to Hits Daily Double, which cites “early retail reads.” That would make Swift the first artist in a decade to have two consecutive albums hit the million mark in their first week — a flashback to the era of Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC, and Eminem.

According to USA Today correspondent Brian Mansfield, via Complex, Swift has already sold 4 million tracks from the album. (An earlier version of this article incorrectly reflected Good Morning America’s report that Red had sold 4 million copies total, but as Mansfield says, “Give the girl some time.”) Then again, Swift would still have to beat Mumford & Sons’ 600,000 copies sold to score the year’s biggest debut week and put the universe back in alignment. Say it with us again: “Ah, fuck.”

Swift’s throwback sales numbers aren’t her only extraordinarily rapid achievement this week. In just six years on the charts, the “You Belong With Me” hitmaker has already landed 50 songs on Billboard’s Hot 100, as ABC reports. The chart arrival of her wubby “I Knew You Were Trouble” made her only the fifth woman to notch 50 songs on the Hot 100. She joins Madonna, Aretha Franklin, Dionne Warwick, and Connie Francis, and easily beats Franklin’s 14 years, six months, and three weeks for the quickest ascent to this milestone. (Swift benefits from charting many tracks that weren’t officially singles, however.)

Still, much as an extra period seems to have quietly vanished from the title of “Trouble,” Swift’s Red is nowhere to be found on Rhapsody. As Hypebot reports, the paid music streaming service says the singer’s team “made a decision not to make her new album available to Rhapsody’s million-plus subscribers for several months.” Garrett Kamps, who has contributed to SPIN and is Rhapsody’s senior director of content programming, says the streamer is mounting an effort to convince Swift to put the album on Rhapsody. Kamps calls for subscribers to “post and tweet and comment,” using the hashtag #wherestaylor.

Swift, who has been keeping busy on the media circuit recently, took over New York City’s Times Square this morning for Good Morning America. Watch her perform “Red” below.

Don’t miss Indie Snobs, Furries, and Wubs: A Freewheeling Chat With Taylor Swift

https://youtube.com/watch?v=OZaqd_0vIUE%3Ffeature%3Dplayer_embedded