Taylor Swift and ‘Tortured Poets’ smash the Spotify streaming record : NPR
Taylor Swift, performing onstage in Sydney, Australia in February.
David Gray/AFP via Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
David Gray/AFP via Getty Images
Taylor Swift, performing onstage in Sydney, Australia in February.
David Gray/AFP via Getty Images
Streaming giant Spotify announced Saturday that the newest album from megastar Taylor Swift, The Tortured Poets Department, has smashed previous records: It’s the first album in Spotify’s history to have more than 300 million streams in a single day.
Tortured Poets reached that record on its release day last Friday. In the same fell swoop, Swift also became the most-streamed artist within a single day ever on Spotify — and the album’s first track, “Fortnight,” which also features Post Malone as a vocalist, became Spotify’s most-streamed song in a single day. (By Monday morning, “Fortnight” had garnered nearly 40 million streams on its own.)
Swift’s sprawling, autobiographical 11th album was initially released as 16 songs at midnight on Friday. Within two hours, however, Swift dropped 15 additional tracks as “The Anthology,” writing on Instagram: “It’s a 2am surprise: The Tortured Poets Department is a secret DOUBLE album.”
Swift beat her own single-day album streaming records with Tortured Poets and now holds all three top spots for this record: her newest project has only surpassed her 2022 album Midnights and 1989 (Taylor’s Version), released in 2023.
