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
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.”