Taylor Swift‘s “Midnights” continues its rampage on the Billboard 200 in week 2, again topping the chart with flying colors and coming in with 342,000 album-equivalent units — the best numbers for an album in its sophomore week in seven years.
The operative phrase in many of these sales and chart stories is “…since Adele’s ’25’ in 2015.” The 342,000 figure for “Midnights” in its second week is the best since “25” tallied a staggering 1.162 million in week 2 seven years ago. Last week, Swift’s album debuted with 1.578 million units, marking the largest weekly total since “25” landed on the chart with 3.482 million.
Looking at the best weekly figures for albums in 2022 so far, “Midnights” holds both the first and third place positions. “Midnights'” first frame holds top honors for a single week, of course, followed by Harry Styles’ “Harry’s House,” which came out of the box with 521,000. The 342,000 units freshly registered for “Midnights” represent the third-best seven-day total of the year to date.
As Billboard reports, Swift’s second-week numbers are still so massive that they beat out the total units earned by the Nos. 2-7 albums on the latest chart combined. Last week, the album’s debut numbers were larger than the Nos. 2-88 albums’ totals rolled into one.
With the blockbuster second week for “Midnights,” Swift disproves any ideas that the success of the album might have been completely front-loaded as a one-week phenomenon due to the boost that came in from advance sales for multiple variants in the LP and CD formats. Actual full-album sales were indeed down sharply in week 2, by 90%, according to Billboard, to 114,000 individual copies for the week. But streaming saw a far less steep decrease, with another 294 million on-demand official streams, a figure that indicates “Midnights” has a long life ahead in the format of choice for most consumers.
It’s more than likely Swift’s two-week reign will be curtailed by the launch of Drake and 21 Savage’s “Her Loss,” which is projected to open at No. 1 in the following week. The 16-song album marks Drake’s second full-length release in 2022, following the No. 1 debut of “Honestly, Nevermind” back in June. Hits Daily Double projects “Her Loss” will open within a range of 370-390,000 units; if that holds true, it would mark a big improvement on “Honestly, Nevermind,” a dance-focused record that opened with a still-impressive 204,000 album-equivalent units in June.
