When isn’t it a big week for Taylor Swift? It’s already been a massive year for the country-turned-pop star, but this is a particularly significant chart moment for her. Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) earned the biggest week in the U.S. for an album all year, debuting at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 with 716,000 equivalent album units in the week ending July 13, according to Luminate.
It’s one of four Swift sets in the chart’s top 10, making her the first living artist to have as many simultaneous top 10 entries in 60 years. She also has three songs in the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100, each from a different album – only The Beatles had done that before.
All of those achievements prove Swift’s supreme stateside star power. But her genre-bending and era-blurring success extends to Billboard’s global charts, where she claims 22 of the July 22-dated lists’ 32 combined debuts. In all, Swift lands 31 songs on the Billboard Global 200 and 28 on the Billboard Global Excl. U.S. ranking. On the latter, she ties Bad Bunny for the most songs logged on the chart in one week.
Those debuts are led by “I Can See You (Taylor’s Version) (From the Vault),” new on the Global 200 at No. 4 and on Global Excl. U.S. at No. 12 on the back of 52.9 million streams and 6,200 downloads sold worldwide. It’s followed by Swift’s “Taylor’s Version” updates of “Back to December,” “Enchanted,” “Mine,” and “Sparks Fly,” all in the top 20 of the former ranking.
“Enchanted” is the only Speak Now track to have charted globally in its original incarnation, spending five weeks on the Global 200 in 2021 and re-entering in May for another nine. Most recently, it was No. 104 on the July 15-dated edition but fell off in the wake of “Enchanted (Taylor’s Version),” down 21% in streams to 10 million in the tracking week. The song’s new version drew 23 million streams.
All 22 songs from Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) debut on the Global 200, while just two – “Ours (Taylor’s Version)” and “Superman” (Taylor’s Version)” – miss the Global Excl. U.S. chart.
Globally, the album’s track list combined for 568.9 million streams and 42,000 downloads sold in its debut frame. Those streams break down to 47% from the U.S. and 53% from beyond – more than double the 21% average U.S. share among all charting songs this week excluding Swift.
Swift is a global superstar, as exemplified by the feverish reaction to her upcoming international shows on her The Eras Tour. To explain the skewed U.S. activity surrounding Speak Now (Taylor’s Version), consider a trend Billboard reported on earlier this year, where debut-week streams lean more heavily toward domestic consumers than older hits do.
This is evident even among her debuts. Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) comprises re-recorded versions of the 2010 original album’s 16 tracks, plus six unearthed “From the Vault” songs. The former group, with a decade of exposure in their original incarnations, average 46% U.S. streams, while the latter, completely new, skew 51%.
Further, Swift sports nine non-debut entries on this week’s Global 200. These songs, from past albums such as 2014’s 1989 and last year’s Midnights, have been charting for much of 2023, many of which crossed over to various radio formats and with big-budget music videos and/or televised performances. Those songs average out to 31% U.S. streams, far less than the 51% of her newest entries.
As with album-bomb debuts by Harry Styles, Karol G, and many more, American listeners over-indexed among the global listenership for the debut week of Speak Now (Taylor’s Version), relative to the international spread for proven hits from Swift’s catalog.
“Cruel Summer,” a resurgent album cut from 2019’s Lover, is No. 5 on the Global 200, and leads all Swift tracks on Global Excl. U.S., at No. 6. Elsewhere, “Blank Space” and “Style” rank higher on the Excl. U.S. chart than the Global 200, performing in opposition to the Speak Now debuts.
Despite the fact that her international share of sales and streams is relatively low, Swift’s overall haul outside the U.S. is record-tying, as she matches Bad Bunny’s 28-song score on the May 21, 2022-dated Global Excl. U.S. chart.
