Taylor Swift (and her tortured poets) just blew up her own Spotify records
Swift's first full album since reaching some new plateau of pop culture godhood is smashing her own streaming records
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Taylor Swift has once again stolen a record from herself—which must be a nice change of pace, after all that shit that went down with her masters a few years back—with Spotify announcing today that Swift’s latest album, The Tortured Poets Department, has already smashed the record for most streamed albums in a single day. A record previously held by one Taylor Swift, for 2022's Midnights, which just barely managed to fend off a challenge last year from 1989 (Taylor’s Version) by Swift, T.
Spotify hasn’t released any formal numbers yet, but since they put out the above tweet announcing the record being broken at all of 3 in the afternoon today, one can assume the victory was fairly decisive. See also the accompanying announcement that Swift also became the most streamed artist in a single day in Spotify’s history, suggesting the music streamer might as well stick a (Taylor’s Version) tag to itself, at least for the day. It’s all of a piece with the general media blitz surrounding Tortured Poets, which feels like it arrives as the first album since Swift did some kind of weird cultural level-up from “Extraordinarily famous person” to “something like an actual pop culture god.”
(Weirdly, given her cultural ubiquity, Swift’s music actually ranks pretty low on Spotify’s list of most-streamed songs, all-time. She doesn’t appear on the list until No. 75, with “Cruel Summer,” which has a bit more than 2 billion total streams. Meanwhile, No. 1 remains The Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights,” which has been streamed more than 4 billion times since it was released in 2019. We have no wider thoughts to apply to this, it’s just kind of strange given how she keeps obliterating these day-of records with each new release.)
Swift released the album (which released alongside a second album, subtitled The Anthology) earlier today. She’s already released the first music video from the album, a Post Malone-heavy love story attached to lead-off track “Fortnight.”
11 Comments
hi! i just wanted to point out why taylor swift doesn’t dominate the streams ranking. 1: she took her music off spotify for 3 years, in those 3 years tons of her songs could have gained hundreds of millions of more streams than they have now (granted, the og ones)2: her albums are usually longer than other artists, which means that streams are divided a bit more (and, given most of her songs arent skips, the streams are usually somewhat even between the bottom 13)
Question: When one of her songs has a billion streams (just to pick a round number), and then she comes our with “Taylor’s Version” of the same song, the streaming totals for the two versions are kept separate, correct?
2 reasons:she took her music off the app for 3 years, so that limited her songs by hundreds millions of streamsher albums are longer and higher quality than most, which means streams get divided more, but overall still shatter records
That photo is absolutely horrifying (to me anyway). The arm grabbing her head doesn’t look like hers. Too reminiscent of the AI horrors everywhere.
This is actually me daring some AI engineer to put that left hand on backwards and give it seven fingers.
Since she’s in the firmament now and forever – up there with Michael Jackson, Madonna etc., and in many ways surpassing them – it’s kind of impressive that she did it without having almost any danceable music (Shake it Off notwithstanding). Beats/rhythms you can embarrass yourself to at weddings are usually the key to going global, but she got there mostly on sad headphone songs. And she did it all after the death of the monoculture.
I wish she’d be experimental. Her last three albums just feel like the same! Jack Antonoff as producer seems to be holding her back somewhat, I sure she is partially to blame but a good producer can help with that.
That’s exactly what I was thinking while listening to this. Granted I’m not totally through it yet, but the only things that have really jumped out at me are “Florida” and the opening of “So Long, London.” There’s not a whole lot of sonic variation, with that underlying synth hum that permeates the album. For me, Taylor’s most fun we she leans in to the weird, I want an album where she just jumps in the deep end.
That will. Never. Happen.
She does tend to follow a certain chord progression in most of her songs.
In what ways surpassing them (that actually matters)? I’m not @-ing you, btw. Sincere question.
Use Your Illusion I and II