Taylor Swift calls the tune in the US music industry

Inside, in addition to an actual CD, is a packet of Polaroid pictures of Swift in various states of dreamy repose. There’s one of her riding the ferry in New York Harbor, another in which she’s lounging wistfully in bed, and a third of her posing in a purple long-sleeved shirt, a version of which (the shirt, that is) fans can buy on her website for $60. At the bottom of each shot there’s a handwritten line from one of the album’s songs. Mr Borchetta says the Polaroid gimmick, created by Swift’s marketing team, led to a flurry of online love between Swift and her fans. On Octover 27, the day of the album’s release, Mr Borchetta says Swift called to say she’d been retweeting fans’ pictures of the Polaroids. “She said: ‘Oh, my God. We’re just having so much fun!’ ” he says.
It’s a Friday afternoon in early November, 11 days after the debut of 1989, which Swift, who came up in Nashville’s country music scene, described in an August Yahoo Live stream as “her very first, documented, official pop album”. In 1989’s first week, 1.29 million copies were sold. That was 22 per cent of all album sales in the US, according to Nielsen SoundScan. It’s the largest sales week for a record since Eminem’s The Eminem Show in 2002, and the biggest release in the past two years by far, topping heavy hitters such as Beyoncé, Coldplay and Lady Gaga. That week, Swift had five songs on the Billboard Hot 100, including Shake It Off, the album’s first single, which was, and still is, sitting comfortably at No  1. She also had two other albums on the Billboard 200—her 2012 album, Red, at No 84, and her 2008 release, Fearless, on the chart for its 221st week, at No 117.
Swift’s success is an anomaly in an ailing industry that has been in decline since 2000. Last month the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) reported that sales of CDs for the first half of 2014 were down 19 per cent from the year before, to 56 million. In 2002 total album sales in the US hovered at 681 million (down from 2001’s 763 million). The top 10 albums of 2002, after The Eminem Show and the 8 Mile soundtrack, included Nellyville (4.9 million albums sold), Avril Lavigne’s Let Go (4.1 million), and the Dixie Chicks’ Home (3.7 million). Compare that with this year: Before 1989, the year’s biggest album was Coldplay’s Ghost Story, which did a piddling 383,000 copies in its first week and has sold a total of 737,000 since its release in May. That’s roughly a third of Swift’s first-week sales, and 1989 is expected to sell another 400,000 copies in its second week. Swift is so far ahead of the pack that they can’t even see her.
For a while, there was hope that digital downloads would make up for low album sales, but the RIAA reports that sales for this format declined by 14 per cent in the first six months of 2014. Meanwhile, revenue from streaming services like Spotify rose 28 per cent. But artists are often paid a fraction of a penny each time users stream a song. “For a digital download, Taylor Swift will probably take home 50 per cent of retail,” says Alice Enders, a London-based music industry analyst. “So that’s 50¢ or 60¢, a lot of money compared to a fraction of a penny,” she says.