Harry Styles has beaten the one-week vinyl sales record previously held by Taylor Swift for her ‘Red (Taylor’s Version)’ in the US last year with his third solo album, ‘Harry’s House‘.
The pop star has made the biggest debut (521,500 equivalent album units in its first week) since Adele’s ’30’ racked up 839,000 units last November. In the process, he’s also set the record for the biggest vinyl sales week of the modern era [via Billboard].
‘Harry’s House’ includes 330,000 in sales without streaming and individual track sales factored in. That means that it’s also the best pure sales week of the year, and a big enough figure that Styles would have posted 2022’s biggest debut based on sales alone.
His sales total includes 182,000 in vinyl sales, the most in a week since the inception of Luminate (then called Nielsen SoundScan) in 1991. That amount surpasses the previous one-week vinyl sales record of 114,000 set by Swift. ‘Harry’s House’ also put up 189,000 streaming equivalent units, equalling 246.96 million on-demand track streams.
The news follows the revelation that it’s the fourth week in a row that a new album in the US has posted the best one-week total of the year following releases by Future, Bad Bunny and Kendrick Lamar.
In the UK on Friday (May 27) Styles scored a chart double, earning Number One spots in both the album and single charts. ‘Harry’s House’ went straight to Number One and is currently the fastest selling album of 2022 so far.
It’s the first time in 2022 that someone has scored a UK chart double. The last was Ed Sheeran with his album ‘=’ and ‘Merry Christmas’ with Elton John at the end of last year.
Meanwhile, Styles has pledged more than $1million (£791,000) to a gun safety support fund in the US. Together with Live Nation, Styles pledged the money to the ‘Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund’ in the US following the Uvalde school shooting last week.
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