Taylor Swift comes on strong-Record Sales announced

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Week Ending Nov. 16, 2008: Teens On Top
Posted Wed Nov 19, 2008 11:40am PST by Paul Grein in Chart Watch
For the first time in nearly a decade, teen acts hold down the top two positions on The Billboard 200. Taylor Swift, 18, opens at #1 with her sophomore album, Fearless. David Archuleta, 17, bows at #2 with his eponymous debut album. This is the first time that teen acts have held the top two spots since January 1999, when Britney Spears, then 17, bowed at #1 with her debut album, ...Baby One More Time, the same week that *NSYNC peaked at #2 with its eponymous debut. Two members of that boy band were teenagers at the time: Justin Timberlake, 17, and Lance Bass, 19.

Swift delivered first-week sales of 592,000 copies. That's the fourth biggest opening sales tally of 2008, topped only by Lil' Wayne, AC/DC and Coldplay. That makes this the biggest first-week tally of 2008 by a female artist and also the biggest by a country artist. The last album by a female artist to debut this big was Mary J. Blige's Growing Pains, which opened in December with sales of 629,000. The last country album to open as big was Rascal Flatts' Me And My Gang, which started with sales of 722,000 in April 2006. (Eagles' Long Road Out Of Eden opened with sales of 711,000, but the Grammys are slotting that album in the Pop Field, rather than Country, which sounds right.)