The biggest hits and chart legacy of Taylor Swift's Red ahead of its rerelease

What are you talking about? Sure that in this streaming Era and automatic albums deliveries help artist to get there when they are out with different rules (until the 90's it took 2 to 3 weeks to have the album selling across all the shops in the country) and artists like Taylor take all marketing chances they can to release in slow weeks with maximum gains to achieve this. Still is impressive she is doing it when she only have one #01 Song Hit in UK. But she is doing it with cheap marketing tricks and re-recording of old albums (and old bonus tracks) not with new material or compiilations with some new fresh material. "The Beatles" even got to #01 with a remaster of one of their albums 50 years later (I may be wrong but I doubt that any Taylor Swift album in 40 or 50 years will get to even be TOP 10).

An album with 30 songs means that if someone streams it full "buys equivalent" 3 albums and not just one. Yet a Beatles album with 30 tracks selling back in the day would only ever count as 1 sale against other albums (some with 9 or 10 tracks). Rules are different and Taylor Swift Record Label marketing team is doing it all right and they should be appretiated too as without them she would never get these chart records.

It's good for Taylor to release as much as she can quick as her sales for her last album to get Platinum certification in UK was "Reputation" released back in 2017. Today most albums peak quick and fall fast (none of her 2020 relases was TOP 10 best selling of the year in UK despite multiple weeks at #01 with really low sales in each week to be #01).

She is getting good chart album peaks but her commercial peak in UK is long gone as 2012 "Red" was her album with most TOP 10 Hits and 2nd best selling album, her 2014 "1989" is her best selling album in UK (and only milllion seller) and "Reputation" her only album with a #01 Hit (but only 2 Top 10 Hits) and 3rd best selling album she have in UK.

"Fearless (Taylor Version)" had lot of hype as it was the first re-recording. It managed to get to #01 but was quicly out of the charts spending 4 weeks inside TOP 40 and 7 weeks inside the TOP 10 (and still wasn't awarded a silver certification meaning sales are still lower than 60k chart units for this album - when you think that after 32 years releasing songs Kylie Minogue latest album sold 55k on first week and was silver the next week put's it into perspective). Not sure how will they create hype enough to make this "new" album streamed a lot on first week but 30 tracks are 3 chart units for each album full streamed so that's a security net already.

I mean the statistical facts:

She broke the Beatles speed record last year (3 #1 albums in the fastest time) and became the first female ever, first artist in almost 50 years and only the 3rd(?) artist ever to achieve 2 new #1 albums of new material in a calendar year in the process.

Having had 2 #1 albums already this year, she will equal last year's achievement again (2 new #1) and equal only the Beatles and T. Rex's 3 in a calendar year. T. Rex's total included a new album, re-issue getting to #1 for the first time and a greatest hits, so not being of new material is a fair test against the chart records as they stand. No one has ever achieved 3 #1 albums of new material or 4 #1 albums at all in a calendar year.

Rag 'n' Bone Man sold 35k copies to be #1 and Kylie was the fastest selling album of the year so far at the time and 2nd best selling weekly total for the whole of 2020, so I'm well aware of the low sales needed. This makes the short-term one-week peak all the more likely, which will equal Kylie's career. Fearless sold 21k - enough to be more than double (11,000 ahead) of the #2 record that week.

Only 3 albums have spent more than 1 week at #1 in the last year. 2 of them are hers and the other one is still there!

Also, the lack of an award doesn't necessarily mean lack of sales. They have to be claimed for. They are not awarded automatically as soon as the relevent sale number goes through the till. It could well have passed the threshold without being claimed for.

You were doing so well, until the last paragraph.... If you were referring to the USA, then yes, you are correct, you have to apply to RIAA to be certified, but in the UK, its automatic, when each sales level is reached.

Things may have changed for streaming and/or Brit Certified since I looked at it then. In the physical era you had to apply for it. As the sales were to wholesale rather than over-the-counter, you could get mismatches in both directions too: (sales without the award, and award without the sales).