Taylor Swift’s ‘The Life of a Showgirl’ Is No. 1 Again on the Billboard 200, and This Time Streaming Did It

The last time ‘The Life of a Showgirl’ owned the top of the American album chart, the story was the merch table. Taylor Swift’s album arrived with CDs, cassettes, vinyl and a run of collectible variants, and the record-breaking debut it produced was built overwhelmingly on copies people paid for. Its return to the summit this week was built on something else: people pressing play.

That is the detail the celebratory coverage of ‘The Encore’ has skated past. The expanded edition, a set of new songs added to the original tracklist, climbed back to the top without the physical-variant machinery that defined the album’s first run. It got there as a digital release carried by a new single, a video premiere and a late-night cameo, and it got there despite the roughest critical reception of the whole cycle.

A No. 1 built on listening

According to Luminate data reported by Variety, ‘The Life of a Showgirl’ earned 173,000 equivalent album units in the United States in the tracking week ending Oct. 1, vaulting from No. 21 to No. 1 on the chart dated Oct. 10. Album sales accounted for just 21,000 of those. Streaming equivalent units made up 136,000, the product of 138.79 million on-demand official streams. Roughly four of every five units came from people listening, not buying.

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Set that beside the debut. The album’s opening week moved 4.002 million units, and 3,479,500 of them were pure sales, alongside 680.9 million streams. That week was powered by a format strategy that included four US CD variants released the day after the album, followed by deluxe digital editions of each. ‘The Encore’, by Variety’s account, had no physical copies on sale during its tracking week at all, only digital downloads alongside streaming.

That complicates the easy read on deluxe reissues. The suspicion that hangs over every expanded edition is that it exists to make the same fans buy the same album twice. This one, in its first week, did something different: it sent listeners back to an album they already had, now sixteen tracks deep, with four new reasons to start it over.

The reviews said one thing, the plays said another

The new songs are ‘Patient Zero’, ‘Cleveland!’, ‘Pink Clouding’ and ‘Babylon’, and Swift has said she wrote them after the success of the original release. Critics were not won over. ‘The Encore’ holds a Metacritic score of 39 from eight reviews, which the aggregator classes as generally unfavorable; the original album sits at 69. Some reviewers questioned whether the four tracks amounted to an extension of the album at all, or something closer to a standalone EP in deluxe packaging.

The rollout did the work the reviews would not. ‘Patient Zero’ got its video premiere at the VMAs, with Swift as a ghost warning another woman about a husband’s intentions, in a clip featuring Dakota Johnson and Colin Farrell. Days later Swift turned up unannounced during Johnson’s opening monologue as host of Saturday Night Live. Variety expected the song to debut at No. 1 on the Hot 100. This is promotional muscle of the old-fashioned kind, and what it moved was streams rather than shrink-wrapped product.

Where this week sits in Swift’s run

The return gives ‘The Life of a Showgirl’ its 13th nonconsecutive week at No. 1 and its first since January, when it last topped the chart on the Jan. 10 ranking. Among Swift’s albums, only ‘The Tortured Poets Department’, with 17 weeks, has spent longer on top, per Variety; ‘1989’ and ‘Fearless’ each logged 11. Olivia Rodrigo finished second this week with 67,000 units, a margin of better than two to one.

Then there is the format nobody has played yet. Variety reports that no physical copies of ‘The Encore’ were on sale during the tracking week, which means the variant playbook that built the record debut has been left in the drawer this time. Whenever a CD or vinyl ‘Encore’ does reach shelves, every copy will land on an album that has just proved it can get back to No. 1 without them.

Tags: Taylor Swift, Patient Zero, The Life of a Showgirl, album charts, Billboard 200

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