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Taylor Swift sells more than a million copies of '1989' in a week

Taylor Swift sells more than a million copies of '1989' in a week

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Don't expect Swift back on Spotify soon

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Taylor Swift is getting used to stunning the music world: first she pulled all of her music from Spotify, and now she has sold more than a million albums in a week for the third straight time. According to USA Today, the flaxen-haired songbird's 1989 sold 1.287 million copies in seven days. This makes it the first album in 2014 to break seven digits and, more importantly, serves as evidence that Swift’s decision to shun streaming services was a shrewd one.

1989 sold over 1.287 million copies in seven days

Only 18 albums in history have sold over a million copies in a week, including Britney Spears' Oops!... I Did It Again and Backstreet Boys' Black and Blue. USA Today writes that analysts initially estimated that 1989 would sell only 1.1 million copies, and that part of the reason behind the album's phenomenal success is that each physical edition comes with one of five sets of 13 Polaroid photos. "Anecdotally, we've seen through Twitter and Facebook that people are buying multiple albums, so they can collect all the Polaroid pictures," said Target spokesperson Evan Miller. Sales made by the retail company reportedly account for 470,000 of the total amount.

With 1989 set to become the best-selling album of the year, it seems unlikely that Taylor Swift will return to Spotify and its dubious pay rates any time soon.