Taylor Swift Poised to Make Chart History with New Album Sales

With the amount of promotion she's been doing, the news that Taylor Swift may sell a million copies of her new album Red this week may not be surprising.  What is surprising is that if it does, she'll have made history.  Specifically, Taylor will be the first female artist ever to have two of her albums albums sell more than a million copies in a single week.

As Billboard reports, first-day sales for Red alone were more than 500,000 copies, so the disc is well on its way to selling more than a million copies by the end of the sales tracking period this Sunday.  As you may recall, Taylor's last album, Speak Now, also topped the one million mark back in 2010.

Billboard reports that if Red does ring the one-million-copy bell, Taylor becomes the first woman ever to have hit this milestone.  Currently, only three acts have had two albums that have sold more than a million copies in a week.  The Backstreet Boys did it with Millennium and Black and Blue.  'N SYNC did it with No Strings Attached and Celebrity.  And Eminem did it with The Marshall Mathers LP and The Eminem Show.

Tellingly, all those albums came out in either 2000 or 2001, before the music industry changed and platinum albums became the exception rather than the rule.  Red will be only the 18th album in the Soundscan era, which started in 1991, to sell a million in a week.