Taylor Swift’s “The Life of a Showgirl” sold 5x as many vinyls as the second-bestselling album last year
The smash hit accounted for 3% of all vinyl sales, per new data.
Vinyl sales rose in the US for the 19th year in a row in 2025, up almost 10% to a whopping 48 million units, and the American music business has one person and one fan base to thank above all others for the boost: Taylor Swift and her legion of loyal devotees.
Swift, or “The Music Industry,” as she’s been known to some for nearly a decade, released her 12th studio album, “The Life of a Showgirl,” last year and — while it received what might generously be termed mixed reviews from critics and even some fans — it became the top-selling vinyl album of the year by some distance, despite only dropping in October.
Last year, “The Life of a Showgirl” accounted for more than 3% of all vinyl album unit sales, with a whopping 1.6 million copies sold, per Luminate data cited by Axios. Indeed, the album shifted more than 5x as many vinyl units as the next top records on the list from megastars like Sabrina Carpenter and Kendrick Lamar... and it wasn’t even Swift’s sole entry in the top 10, as a re-pressing of her seventh studio album, “Lover,” recorded live in Paris also spun its way onto the chart.
Girlboss too close to the sun
While Swift’s followers are notoriously devoted — whether that’s showing up for her on streaming platforms, at live shows, or in cinemas — the way that the star rolls out her releases has a lot to do with their record-breaking standing. “Showgirl,” for instance, came with 27 physical variants for Swifties to snap up, including eight different vinyl records, from the “Sweat and Vanilla Perfume Portofino Orange Glitter” edition to the “Tiny Bubbles in Champagne Edition (Red Lipstick & Lace Transparent)” version. Clearly, offering very slightly different versions of the same record is a playbook that continues to pay off at Swift HQ.
