I Knew It!
Now, let's look at this dispassionately for a moment.
Taylor Swift is a busy, multimillionairess singer-songwriter. She has a personal business empire to run, projects to schedule, a personal life to handle - a wedding to plan! Surely she has more important things to occupy her time than the minutiae of international chart positions.
And yet, time after countless time, there are examples of where another act - another female act - threatens her moments of world domination. Where someone's new record starts doing numbers which overshadow her own. Taylor Swift always seems to manage to find a new edition, some extra limited edition physicals, down the back of her sofa. Ones whose sales give her the bump to block her replacement at No.1. This happens far too often for it to be a coincidence.
So picture if you will, Taylor Swift this week kicking her heels at home. Reading the midweek flashes that come in from chart compilers across the globe. Numbers which reveal her big Toy Story 5 soundtrack hit I Knew It I Knew You just wasn't pulling in the numbers like before. Not only was it sagging badly on the charts but it was in danger of being utterly blown away by the new album from a female rival. And as far as she was concerned that was utterly unacceptable.
And so it came to be that on Wednesday, a day when the midweek updates suggested that her No.1 single from last week may be struggling to even remain Top 5 in the UK, a large - no, enormous - batch of pre-ordered physical copies of I Knew It I Knew You were dispatched to willing punters. The result means that in defiance of all expectations and every single previously tracked set of midweeks she remains at the top of the Official UK Singles chart for a second week running.
The numbers involved are nothing short of extraordinary. Taylor Swift sold just eight shy of 43,000 CDs last week. Combined with the 28,000 streaming units (which alone would have only been enough to land her the No.8 position) I Knew It I Knew You posts a colossal chart sale of 71,404. That's just enough to qualify as the highest weekly sale of the year so far - ahead of the 70,498 posted by Harry Styles with Aperture back in February.
In a world where nobody actually buys CD singles any more, this is a quite barmy number. I mean who on earth are these people who were holding out for such a purchase? The last track to sell so many physical CDs in a single week was X Factor 2014 winner Ben Haenow who moved 47,000 with his coronation single. Even The Beatles only did 38,096 physical sales of Now And Then in November 2023 - and those were a mixture of CD and vinyl.
If all of this was planned, then fair play to her for staging such a coup. But with the streams of the track sagging so badly, is she destined next week for one of the biggest non-ACR induced drops from the top we have seen in several years? Unless of course she has a different plan in mind.
Most of them are now selling upwards of thirty quid a pop on eBay
— Lee Thompson (@leethommo) June 20, 2026
O-Rod
I write all the above with all due apologies to Olivia Rodrigo, because in all other ways this was her week, just as it was always scheduled to be. Her third studio album You Seem Pretty Sad For A Girl So In Love storms to the top of the albums chart with a suitably colossal sale of its own. 102,814 units is her final tally, second only to Harry Styles' 180k+ as the biggest of the year so far. Some reviews have hinted that the new album doesn't quite hold a candle to its predecessors. Well, go figure. SOUR moved 50,000 on debut with GUTS posting 60,000.
It means Olivia Rodrigo becomes only the fourth female soloist to debut at No.1 with her first three albums. The others are Adele, Billie Eilish, and… Susan Boyle!
Incidentally, her first two albums SOUR and GUTS had their titles stylized in uppercase letters just as I've written here. The new album (and all its tracks) are supposed to go reverse uno on this and are all in lowercase. I'm not ignoring that to be contrary, it just gets tedious fighting with text editor autocorrect after a while. And it also makes even Official Charts look like they are editorialising in headlines:
Huge album streams inevitably mean some spectacular singles chart move and, Taylor Swift stunt releasing aside, this is naturally the case this week. The Number One single that wasn't is the album's second track Stupid Song. One listen and you can understand why it was the biggest. Another example of a template Rodrigo track where she starts small and then rises to hysterical crescendo delivering a frantic lyric as if occupying the person of a woman going ever so slightly unglued over a man. She's an actress who sings, but also for these purposes a singer who knows how to act. Like the best of all her tracks Stupid Song leaves you emotionally battered, bewildered at what you just heard, and ever so slightly terrified.
Stupid Song debuts at No.2 with a sale of just shy of 54,000 units - some 18,000 behind Taylor Swift. On streams alone though it should have landed her a second No.1 hit of the year by a country mile. Under old school chart rules every one of the album's tracks would have qualified for a place in the Top 20. But you are naturally only allowed three as a primary artist. Previous Rodrigo single The Cure rallies 4-3 in its fourth week on parade; former No.1 Drop Dead asserts itself as her third biggest track this week and rockets 13-5.
On And On And On
That means we are left with just one Top 5 single that has not been mentioned yet. That is, naturally, Rein Me In, languishing at No.4 as it celebrates its 52nd straight week as a Top 40 hit single. As previously noted on these pages, the all-time record is 54 weeks held by Ed Sheeran's Thinking Out Loud, one which it is guaranteed to surpass. The Sam Fender and Olivia Dean track increases its streaming by the tiny margin of 0.82% this week. But that was all that it needed. The hit record with the most charmed of lives has avoided an ACR reversal yet again. I can't quite see it ascending back to No.1 for yet another run any time soon. But in this wild, crazy chart world, who are we to presume this?
We must zoom past another largely becalmed Top 20, whose numbers are only stirred slightly by the 18-12 climb of Harry Styles' American Girls. This is, as you might guess, prompted by increased love for his work as he starts a series of summer dates on these shores. This has also meant a No.25 re-entry for the ACR-escaping Aperture. Meanwhile, the virally-awakened Sign Of The Times rallies too, back up to No.29. Harry Styles' three hits of the moment all just happen to be former No.1 singles. Even if they are of wildly varying vintages.
Imagine The Queue For The Toilets
K-Pop acts are huge, we know this. Not always in sales terms, but by their sheer numbers. So what do you get if you smoosh no less than three such acts together? That's the situation we discover with the No.22 single Iconic By Mistake, a three-way collaboration between Le Sserafim, Illit and Katseye. The former are a five-piece girl group, last seen backing J-Hope on his No.46 single Spaghetti last year. Illit are new to the charts, but there are also five of them, while Katseye of whom we know well are six in number. Normally you only get as many as sixteen performers on charity singles. But where K-Pop is concerned, more is more I guess.
Ing Er Lund
Grumbling about a lack of football-themed records a couple of weeks ago was, I guess, premature. The 2026 World Cup is in full swing, football fever has taken hold, and relevant songs are creeping into the charts. The charge is led by Dai Dai, as FIFA artist of choice Shakira (with Burna Boy in tow) performs the tournament's official anthem. It is a song which has little to do with America or even football, but which is played at every match as the times walk out and gives her the chance to do the Hips Don't Lie dance in the video. So I guess we can call that a win.
We also encounter FIFA's very own Shakira once more at No.37. Waka Waka (This Time For Africa) which she recorded for the 2010 tournament in South Africa makes a rather startling comeback 16 years after it first reached No.21.
We are on more familiar ground as Three Lions by David Baddiel, Frank Skinner and The Lightning Seeds charts once more at No.35 to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the 30 years of hurt it famously references. No.1 for the first time in 1996 (with a re-recorded version also topping the pile two years later) it famously rebounded to the top of the charts in July 2018 to coincide with England's run to the World Cup semi finals. Since then it has reached No.4 in 2021 (for England's run to the final of the delayed Euro 2020), No.20 in 2022 (World Cup again) and No.8 two years ago as England once more reached the European Championship final. From this we can deduce that the song's chart fortunes mirror that of the team. Is this week's 4-2 win over Croatia an omen?
Jocks Wa-Hey
We should acknowledge Scotland too. "Official" team anthems are a thing of the past thank goodness, but performer Nick Morgan created one of his own to celebrate Scotland's appearance in Euro 2024 in the shape of No Scotland No Party. With the title having become something of a motto for the Tartan Army the song is back in reworked form for the World Cup and now charts properly for the very first time at No.74. Its original release two years ago saw it hit No.16 on the old school sales chart. Alas Official Charts discontinued the Scottish Singles Chart in 2020, so we've no way of knowing how well it has done in the motherland. Although following Friday night's result, we probably aren’t hearing from it again in any event.
