Over the course of a weekend, Taylor Swift sells 700,000 LPs, breaking the record for weekly vinyl sales in only three days with her “Tortured Poets Department.”

It sounds strange to talk about “breaking records” while talking about actual LPs, yet it’s impossible to resist combining these ideas when talking about Taylor Swift, the modern vinyl queen. She broke her own record for most vinyl album sales in a week in only three days, selling 700,000 LP copies of “The Tortured Poets Department” over the course of the weekend.

The previous weekly record was achieved by Swift’s October 2017 song “1989 (Taylor’s Version),” which sold 693,000 copies in only seven days. Billboard broke the story that Swift had broken her own recent high-water mark.

Who held the record until last year, when “1989” overtook it? Yes, Swift is included as well. “Midnights” broke the record for weekly vinyl sales when it was released in October 2022, selling an incredible 570,000 LP copies.

You had to go back five months before “Midnights” to find someone who, apart from Taylor Swift, was setting the record for the most weekly records. Harry Styles’ sales figures were the highest since “Harry’s House” sold 372,000 vinyl copies in its first week of release.

Reiterating that these records are all for what is commonly called “the modern era” (i.e., the years after 1991, when SoundScan began keeping painstakingly researched sales totals for albums released on vinyl, CD, cassette, download, and all other formats) is important as these records are added. It’s possible that certain albums sold more than 700,000 vinyl copies in a single week during the period when LPs dominated the music business in the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s, but statistics weren’t being collected at the time. In any case, no one else has even come close to matching Swift’s debut album sales during the previous 33 years.

Industry insiders who believe that vinyl should once again become the most widely used sales medium will be watching closely to see how well “Tortured Poets” does when sales are tallied over seven days instead of just three.

Naturally, a lot of Swifties are buying several copies of the variants, which is beneficial for the record. The new edition is offered in four variations, each with a distinct cover art that is different on the inside and outside, along with a unique extra track and subtitle. Only three of the four main vinyl versions—which were touted as limited editions that would only be available for a short while—were supplied via Swift’s online shop. Near the release date, however, they were finally replenished there and made available to physical retailers as well. The Swift webstore offers an additional version with the same track lineup as the main edition, which is a clear vinyl Target edition.

Vinyl has only accounted for a little yet significant portion of Swift’s overall sales this week. Billboard reports that “The Tortured Poets Department” sold 1.5 million copies in its first three days of release. This includes CD, cassette, and download sales in addition to vinyl sales. Nevertheless, the math shows that LPs account for nearly half of sales, with the remaining 800,000 coming from the other three sales mediums.

After four more days of sales and a week’s worth of streaming statistics, “The Tortured Poets Department” could easily surpass 2 million album-equivalent units for the week. To far, it has sold 1.5 million. If so, Adele’s 2015 album “25” will be the first to sell more than two million copies in a single week. (Adelaide’s 3.38 million total units may be difficult to surpass since, in the intervening year, streaming has mostly supplanted sales, which are only worth a tiny percentage of what sales are calculated to be in the chart methodology.)

The idea that pop singers are the vinyl record industry’s aristocracy is still relatively new in the age of LPs. In June 2014, rock artist Jack White made headlines when he smashed the record for the most vinyl sales in a single week, which was set 10 years earlier. Then, in a startling turn of events, his second solo album, “Lazaretto,” broke the record by selling an astounding 40,000 LPs in its first week.