Taylor Swift’s ‘Midnights’ continues its rampage on the Billboard 200 in Week 2, topping the chart again with flying colors and with 342,000 album-equivalent units – the best numbers for an album in its second week in seven year.
The key phrase in many of these sales and chart stories is “…since Adele turned 25 in 2015.” The 342,000 figure for “Midnights” in its second week is the best since “25” hit a staggering 1.162 million in week 2 seven years ago. Last week, Swift’s album debuted with 1.578 million units, marking the biggest weekly total since “25” landed on the chart with 3.482 million.
Looking at the top weekly numbers for albums in 2022 so far, “Midnights” holds both the first and third spot. The first frame of “Midnights” holds the top honors for a single week, of course, followed by Harry Styles’ “Harry’s House,” which came out of the box with 521,000. third-best seven-day total of the year so far.
As Billboard reports, Swift’s second-week numbers are still so massive that they beat the total number of units earned by albums #2-7 on the latest combined chart. Last week, the album’s opening numbers were larger than the totals of albums #2 through 88 combined into one.
With the hit second week of “Midnights,” Swift refutes any notion that the album’s hit might have been fully loaded as a week-long phenom due to increased advance sales for multiple variations of the LP. and CD formats. Actual sales of full albums were indeed down sharply in Week 2, by 90%, according to Billboard, to 114,000 individual copies for the week. But streaming saw a much less steep decline, with an additional 294 million official on-demand streams, a figure that indicates “Midnights” has a long life ahead of it in the format of choice for most consumers.
It’s more than likely that Swift’s two-week reign will be cut short by the launch of Drake and 21 Savage’s “Her Loss,” which is set to open at No. 1 the following week. The 16-song album marks Drake’s second full release of 2022, following the No. 1 debut of “Honestly, Nevermind” in June. Hits Daily Double “Her Loss” projects will open in the range of 370-390,000 units; if true, it would mark a big improvement over “Honestly, Nevermind,” a dance-focused record that debuted with a still-impressive 204,000 album-equivalent units in June.