Taylor Swift and her musical disciple Olivia Rodrigo are among the most popular artists of 2021, based on mid-year sales figures from MRC Data.
Olivia’s “Drivers License” is the most-streamed and most-consumed song of the first half of 2021, with just over 582 million on-demand streams.
“Butter” and “Dynamite” by K-pop superstars BTS are the two best-selling digital songs of the first half of the year; “Drivers License” is number six on that list.
Taylor is the top-selling artist of 2021, based on total album sales: She’s sold 934,000 copies of her various albums across all formats. Her late 2020 release evermore is the top-selling album so far, with 374,000 copies sold, while her two other albums of the past 12 months, folklore and Fearless (Taylor’s Version), are in the top 10.
However, the most popular album overall in the U.S. for the first half of the year, based on sales and streaming, is embattled country star Morgan Wallen’s Dangerous: The Double Album. It topped the charts for 10 weeks and earned just over two million equivalent album units.
Using those same parameters, the rest of the most popular albums for the first half of the year include Olivia’s SOUR, Justin Bieber‘s JUSTICE, The Weeknd‘s After Hours, Dua Lipa‘s Future Nostalgia and Taylor’s evermore.
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