4 Lessons from Taylor Swift's 1.2M Sales

Few people thought she could do it, but Taylor Swift is on track to sell 1.2 million copies of her new album, 1989, in the first week of its release. Last week, Billboard gloomily predicted she would sell only 800,000 to 900,000, which wasn’t so far-fetched: None of Swift’s peers had crossed the one-week, 1 million-unit threshold this year. The prevailing theory was that she would fall victim to the same trend. Instead, Swift is embarrassing the naysayers. There are lessons to be learned from her success.