Never bet against Swifties.
Taylor Swift’s loyal fan base not only sent the singer’s latest album, The Tortured Poets Department, to the top of the sales charts upon its release, they obliterated a number of streaming records in the process.
Despite a partial leak of the album a day and a half before its release, Tortured Poets has set records on Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music.
The numbers from Spotify, the largest streaming service, put into context just how big a pop culture phenomenon the record was. In the first day of its release, Tortured Poets was streamed 300 million times. It became the most streamed album of the year in less than 12 hours.
Prior to its release, no album had crossed even the 200-million-stream line this year—not even Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter.
In addition, “Fortnight,” the album’s first single, quickly became the most-streamed song in a single day in the company’s history.
The records Swift broke, of course, were her own. Last year, she racked up 26.1 billion streams on Spotify alone.
Apple, meanwhile, has declared the record the “biggest pop album of all time” as judged by first-day streams. Apple, unlike Spotify, does not give specific numbers. And Amazon Music said Tortured Poets became “the most streamed album in its first week on Amazon Music globally—in just three days!”
Swift first revealed Tortured Poets at the Grammy Awards, but the fact that it was a double album was a secret she managed to keep until its release.
“I’d written so much tortured poetry in the past 2 years and wanted to share it all with you, so here’s the second installment of TTPD: The Anthology,” she posted on Threads hours after the album dropped. “15 extra songs. And now the story isn’t mine anymore… it’s all yours.”
