Taylor Swift's Folklore has broken several first-day streaming records!
Taylor Swift delivered arguably this year’s biggest surprise in the music industry when the 30-year-old singer announced her new album Folklore with just one day’s notice.
“ll be releasing my entire brand new album of songs I’ve poured all of my whims, dreams, fears, and musings into,” she wrote on social media hours before the release. “I wrote and recorded this music in isolation but got to collaborate with some musical heroes of mine.”
Swift’s Folklore nearly broke the internet when the surprise album dropped last Friday, and her fans have responded by streaming the 16 songs featured on the set non-stop ever since.
In just a few days after its release, her 8th album began breaking Guinness World Records titles.
Folklore has now set the global record for first-day album streams on Spotify by a female artist with 80.6million streams.
It is also the most-streamed album on Apple Music in 24 hours with 35.47million streams and has set the indie/alternative streaming record in the US and worldwide on Amazon Music.
As it stands, her album has already crossed the 200 million views mark on Spotify, the fastest for any female album ever.
What’s especially impressive about this feat is that apart from dropping one post on Instagram 24 hours prior to the release, she did not promote the album in any other way.
Even more impressive is that Folklore offers a twist on Swift’s traditional country-pop style, and more often not, when an artist drastically adjusts his or her style, fans don’t particularly react well to the change.
The Grammy award-winning artist co-wrote 15 of the 16 tracks on Folklore alongside producers Aaron Dessner (a member of the rock band The National) and long-time collaborator Jack Antonoff.
On 24 July 2020, Folklore tracks occupied the entire Top 5 and eight of the Top 10 on Spotify’s Global Top 200 streaming chart, and the album shows no signs of slowing down a week after its release. With 10 Grammy Awards under her belt, Folklore is her highest rated critically acclaimed album on Metacritic, currently ranked 96.5.