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Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are coming up on their wedding date, but Swift is also getting great career news.
Taylor Swift has experienced heartbreak on the way to finding her prince charming in Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs, and the musician’s discography shows that search for love. Now, Kelce and Swift are planning their wedding together, and Swift has found her prince, so the breakup songs are turning into love songs.
But, that doesn’t take away from her lengthy catalog of songs, many of which do happy to be about former relationships that went wrong. Now, Swift is being recognized for her body of work by Billboard, and it shows that she’s one of the strongest and most popular musicians of the past decade.
There’s something unique about the first week an album hits the charts. For an artist such as Swift, it’s always fairly obvious that she’ll be at No. 1 that first week out, but there’s still excitement surrounding the album’s debut and anticipation of that final number. Swift dropped her 12th studio album, “The Life of a Showgirl,” in October of 2025, and it debuted on the Billboard 200 chart on October 18, selling 4.002 million units, according to research from Billboard. But, that album, of course, wasn’t the only album of hers that had a big debut this decade.
Billboard Honors Taylor Swift as the Artist With the Biggest Debuts of the Decade
In a piece out on Wednesday, April 1, Keith Caulfield of Billboard lays out the albums with the biggest debuts of the 2020s. The idea came from BTS’ latest album, “ARIRANG,” debuting at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart, dated April 4, with 641,000 equivalent album units sold, according to data from Luminate.
“That figure not only marks the biggest week for any album in 2026 thus far, but it is also the biggest week for an album by a group since the chart began ranking titles by units in December 2014,” Caulfield noted in the piece.
But, Swift still has BTS beaten in terms of the numbers of her albums that had big debuts on the Billboard 200 chart over the decade. In the tally, Swift makes history as the artist with the most No. 1 debuts this decade on that chart. The Billboard 200 chart, by the way, tallies the most popular albums of the week in the U.S. using multi-metric consumption as measured in equivalent album units, put together by Luminate.
Taylor Swift Rules the Tally of the Biggest Debut Albums of the 2000s, and She’s Also No. 1
Swift had seven spots on the tally out of the available 12, making her the clear winner. She was at No. 10 with “Red (Taylor’s Version),” No. 7 with “Speak Now (Taylor’s Version),” No. 5 with “folklore,” No. 4 with “Midnights,” No. 3 with “1989 (Taylor’s Version),” No. 2 with “Taylor Swift, The Tortured Poets Department” and, yes, No. 1 with “The Life of a Showgirl.”
“As of the April 4, 2026-dated chart, there have been just a dozen albums that have debuted with at least 500,000 units,” Caulfield adds.
Swift has released three singles off “The Life of a Showgirl” so far: “Elizabeth Taylor,” “Opalite” and “The Life of Ophelia.” She has yet to release her song about Kelce from the set, “Wood,” as a single, but that would make for a good wedding day drop.
On Tuesday, March 10, Kelce appeared on “The Pat McAfee Show” and was questioned about his wedding date. He said that the couple plan to get married “before training camp” in July, so the date is getting closer.
Anne Erickson is an award-winning reporter for Heavy Sports covering the NFL, NBA and college football. Anne Erickson has years of experience covering the NFL and additional sports, and her work has been published via ESPN, Fox Sports and more. She has interviewed some of the biggest names in sports, including Detroit Lions quarterback Jared Goff. Erickson also hosts several podcasts and is a Detroit-based radio host. More about Anne Erickson
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