"Enough to buy Beyoncé’s catalog": Netizens react after report reveals revenue generated by Taylor Swift’s ‘The Life Of A Showgirl’ in first week

Taylor Swift once took over the internet after a report revealed the staggering revenue generated by her The Life of a Showgirl album in its debut week. On October 29, 2025, popular X (formerly Twitter) account Pop Crave shared the news about Swift and cited Billboard’s latest report.

“Taylor Swift’s ‘The Life Of A Showgirl’ generated around $135 million in revenue in its first week, Billboard estimates,” Pop Crave wrote in the caption.

The post was linked to Billboard’s October 27 report, which provided a detailed breakdown of the record’s first-week numbers. As per the report, The Life of a Showgirl sold 1.76 million CDs, 1.334 million vinyl records. It also sold 358,000 digital album downloads, 26,000 cassettes, and 523,000 album-equivalent units based on streaming

The album brought in about $80 million in revenue from the U.S. market, and when extrapolated globally, the total reached an astonishing $135 million.

As soon as Pop Crave’s post gained traction, netizens flooded the comment section with their reactions. One user joked about the sheer scale of Swift’s success and compared her revenue to singer Beyoncé’s entire catalogue

“Enough to buy beyoncé’s catalog,” the user wrote.

Many X users congratulated the Opalite singer for achieving such a massive feat, praising her unmatched ability to generate record-breaking sales.

However, not all reactions were positive. Some X users suggested that Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl may not have been musically her strongest work, but still performed exceptionally well because of Swift’s fiercely loyal fan base and her strategy of releasing multiple variants of the same album.

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Taylor Swift reflects on the record-breaking success of The Life of a Showgirl

Taylor Swift (Image via Getty Images)

Although, according to Billboard, Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl album had generated an estimated $135 million in revenue, the singer herself had not addressed the milestone earnings.

On October 13, 2025, the 35-year-old, however, addressed her record-breaking album sales, which had surpassed the record previously held by Adele’s 25 in 2015, with a heartfelt Instagram post.

In the post, Taylor Swift reflected on how far she had come since releasing her debut album nearly two decades earlier.

“I’ll never forget how excited I was in 2006 when my first album sold 40,000 copies in its first week. I was 16 and couldn’t even fathom that that many people would care enough about my music to invest their time and energy into it,” Taylor Swift wrote.

Looking back on her humble beginnings, Swift added that since releasing her first album, Taylor Swift, in 2006, she had “tried to meet and thank as many people” as she could who had given her “the chance to chase this insane dream.”

“Here we are all these years later and a hundred times that many people showed up for me this week. I have 4 million thank you’s I want to send to the fans, and 4 million reasons to feel even more proud of this album than I already was,” she continued.

She went on to thank fans for “going out to celebrate this project in the movie theaters,” investing in “vinyl,” “streaming,” buying CDs, watching the music videos, reading the poems she had written “inside the packaging,” and “immersing” themselves in The Life of a Showgirl.

“I’ll cherish this feeling forever. Just wow. Thank you for the lovely bouquet,” she added.

Earlier this month, during an October 7 interview with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, Swift had also addressed the mixed reviews surrounding the album.

At the time, she explained that she took a pragmatic approach to criticism, remarking that even her detractors were “helping” her by keeping her name in conversation.

Swift also acknowledged that every listener was “allowed to feel exactly how they want,” emphasizing that artists were meant to serve as a “mirror” to the public rather than dictate opinion. She tied this sentiment back to her album’s overarching message, noting:

“An album is a really, really wild way to look at yourself… We’re doing this thing for keeps. I have such an eye on legacy when I’m making my music. I know what I made, I know I adore it.”

The 35-year-old further remarked that the mixed reviews themselves were an essential part of her musical legacy and helped capture the very essence of what The Life of a Showgirl represented.

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Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl was released on October 3, 2025. According to Billboard, the album secured its third consecutive week at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart, earning 194,000 equivalent album units in the United States.

Edited by Shayari Roy