It’s hard to remember that there was ever a fleeting moment that Taylor Swift and the streaming music industry didn’t see eye to eye, now that she’s setting and re-setting records as the Queen of Stream.
Spotify reps say that Swift broke two records for the service on Friday, the day that “Red (Taylor’s Version)” came out.
One is the record for the most-streamed album in a day by a female in Spotify history. “Red (Taylor’s Version)” accomplished that by picking up over 90.8 million streams on day one.
The previous record-holder? Also Swift, with “Folklore,” a July 2020 release that was the first of two new albums Swift put out last year. And the new “Red” came in miles ahead of the mark she set with “Folklore,” which had a mere 78.7 streams when it set the previous benchmark 16 months ago.
(If you’re curious about who last held that record who was not Taylor Swift, it was Ariana Grande, who set a high mark with the “Thank U, Next” album when it came out in February 2019.)
The other Spotify record broken by Swift Friday was the one for the most-streamed female in a single day in Spotify history. She did that with more than 122.9 million streams on Friday.
That means that about about a quarter of the nearly almost 123 million streams Swift picked up Friday were for albums other than “Red (Taylor’s Version).” Since the new release lasts more than two hours, it’s a mystery how fans had time to stay dialed in for anything else from the catalog, but they did.
Of course, Swift is unlike most pop artists in still maintaining a robust sales presence, and sales estimates have yet to come in for the two-CD or four-LP versions of “Red (Taylor’s Version).” But it will not be a surprise if the vinyl edition sets some kind of record when the first-week figures come in, since her fans have demonstrably embraced that format in the year and a half since “Folklore” vinyl became a phenomenon, with the recent delayed LP release of “Fearless (Taylor’s Version)” being the key factor in returning that album to No. 1.
Beyond already serious pent-up interest, Swift helped goose streams and sales with back-to-back appearance plugging the album on Jimmy Fallon’s and Seth Meyer’s shows Thursday. The promotion continues this weekend with an appearance on “Saturday Night Live,” where she’s expected to have a single performance slot, doing the newly released 10-minute version of fan favorite “All Too Well.”
