NEWS: Taylor Swift's Album Sells 1m Copies In First Week

With 1,046,718 copies sold in the US in the first week of release, Taylor Swift’s Speak Now album has scored SoundScan’s biggest single-week sales total since 2005 and is the biggest debuting country studio album in history.

Speak Now accounted for 18% of total albums sold in the US this week, setting a new record for percentage of total sales in a single week. One out of every five CDs or download sales this week was Taylor’s Speak Now album, which was released on Big Machine Records.

Speak Now is just the 16th album in the SoundScan era to sell over a million copies in one week, and Taylor joins Whitney Houston, Norah Jones and Britney Spears as the only female artists in history to sell more than a million albums in a debut week.

The opening week sales of Speak Now also marked the largest debut album release total (all genres) at Target in the history of the retail chain. Taylor, who earlier this year won four Grammys - Including Album of the Year for Fearless, wrote the Speak Now album entirely by herself, and co-produced the project with Nathan Chapman.

The sales and chart success of Speak Now is matched by the album’s critical acclaim. Rolling Stone awarded the CD 4 stars, writing: “People like to fixate on Taylor Swift's youth, as if to say, yeah, she's pretty good for her age. But that just begs a question: Where are all the older people who are supposedly making better pop records than Taylor Swift? There aren't any.”

Taylor plans to tour in support of Speak Now, and is currently slated to play 85 shows in 18 countries next year. Her 15-month, 107-date Fearless 2009 / 2010 Tour sold out arenas and stadiums in 88 cities in five countries spanning four continents. Naturally, we’re all crossing our fingers in the hope that 2011 will see Taylor make it to New Zealand!

Speak Now is available now.