To no one’s surprise, Taylor Swift’s

surprise album

Swift’s eighth album debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s 200 albums chart this week, marking the best first-week sales of the year and giving the pop star her seventh No 1 title on the chart. The album sold 846,000 equivalent albums in the USbased on a combination of sales and streams, according to Nielsen Music/MRC Data.

The last album to sell more units in

a single week? Swift’s Lover album,released last August.

The success makes Swift, 30, the first artiste to have seven different albums sell at least 500,000 albums in a single week. Swift dropped “folklore” in a surprise form, announcing the album’s release a day before it came out on July 24.

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 Folklore was only released digitally, but will be available as a CD on August 7. The album was sold with a number of merchandise bundles, packaged with cardigans, hoodies, T-shirts, cell phone cases and more. A digital version of folklore came with a purchase of one of the merchandise items, counting as an album sale for Swift.