By Ethan Millman
Taylor Swift‘s The Tortured Poets Department has sold more copies than any other album this year so far, and it’s not particularly close according to data from Luminate’s midyear report released Tuesday morning.
Counting pure sales alone, The Tortured Poets Department sold 2.474 million copies through the first half of 2024. Billie Eilish’s Hit Me Hard and Soft took second with about 306,000 copies sold, and Beyonce’s Cowboy Carter came in third with about 257,000 sales. The rest of the Top 10 included four more Swift albums as well as Tomorrow X Together’s Minisode 3: Tomorrow, which took sixth, Ateez’s Golden Hour: Part One at seventh, and Twice’s With You-th taking ninth. Those nine other albums combined for about 1.924 million units, about half a million fewer than TTPD.
Some of that success is attributable to the many different TTPD variations Swift has released, eclipsing three dozen. Swift has caught flak from some critics and stans online who’ve argued that the sheer volume of releases is exploitative of her devout fanbase, or that it’s part of a gauche charting strategy to block other albums from dethroning her.
Luminate highlighted the rise of physical album variants in particular in its report Tuesday, noting that the trend started increasing about four years ago. The Top 10 bestselling physical albums of this year so far had about seven different vinyl variants, 13 cds, and two cassettes, Luminate said. Eilish called the practice “wasteful” in an interview with Billboard earlier this year. Swift’s fanbase had pushed back on the statement, and Eilish subsequently specified she wasn’t calling out any one artist but drawing attention to the strategy overall.
“When it comes to variants, so many artists release them — including ME! Which I clearly state in the article,” Eilish said in April. “The climate crisis is now and it’s about all of us being part of the problem and trying to do better. Sheesh.”
While Swift commands impressive sales, her latest album is also a streaming behemoth. At 2.753 billion streams, The Tortured Poets Department holds a 500 million stream lead over Morgan Wallen’s One Thing At a Time as the most-streamed album in the United States in the first half of 2024.
Between sales and streams, The Tortured Poets Department has a total of 4.66 million album equivalent units through the first half of the year, per Luminate. One Thing at a Time took second at 1.776 million, followed by Noah Kahan’s Stick Season in third with 1.224 million. Cowboy Carter is in fourth with 1.105 million, and SZA’s SOS came in at fifth with 1.064 million.
On the individual songs side, Benson Boone’s “Beautiful Things” is the biggest song of the year through the first half of 2024, with 1.434 billion streams worldwide. Teddy Swims’ “Lose Control” is the second-biggest with 1.117 billion, while “Cruel Summer” took third at just over a billion streams. In the U.S. alone, “Beautiful Things” remains Number One with 448 million streams, while Zach Bryan and Kacey Musgraves’ “I Remember Everything” was second with 437.3 million streams. “Lose Control” took third with 409.7 million.
Luminate’s report also included data around live music as well as the fastest-growing genres in the country. Sixty-four percent of all monthly music spending came from live music, Luminate said. Latin, buoyed by Música Mexicana, was the fastest-growing genre in the U.S. measured by audio streams, per Luminate, followed by rock, pop, and country.
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