Taylor Swift is riding high on 4/20, but not for the reasons you might think. Though she’s currently on a break from her Eras Tour, the billionaire singer is hard at work promoting her new double album, The Tortured Poets Department, which was released first thing on Friday; later that day, she announced its first single, dropped its first video, and announced a related social media challenge. All that hustling paid off Saturday, as music platform Spotify has announced that she’s smashed the streamer’s (and, in several cases, her own) records across multiple categories in only one day.
On Friday, Spotify announced on X (formerly Twitter) that TTPD was its most-streamed album in a single day, but at the time that stat was quantified as over 200 million streams. Even that number put it heads and shoulders above the previous record holder, who also happens to be Taylor Swift: Her albums 1989 (Taylor’s Version) and Midnights had previously owned those top slots.
Spotify revised that streaming figure Saturday, saying the final one-day tally was over 300 million, the first album in its history to reach that benchmark.
Swift is also “the most-streamed artist in a single day in Spotify history,” the company announced. As with the album achievement, we don’t need to worry about the feelings of the previous title holder, as the last record was set on October 27, 2023 by none other than Taylor Swift, who’d just released 1989 (Taylor’s Version).
And the hits keep coming, as Spotify tweeted on Saturday that the first single from TTPD, “Fortnight,” “became Spotify’s most-streamed song in a single day.” As of publication time, the company has not announced how many streams it took to achieve that distinction.
For the sake of comparison, however, it was reported late last year that Mariah Carey’s 1994 holiday song, “All I Want For Christmas Is You,” set a single-day streaming record on December 24, 2023 with 23,701,697 streams. Carey was also Spotify’s top single-day song stream artist the previous Christmas Eve, when the same tune received 21,273,357 streams.
So, is Swift the Grinch who just stole Christmas? Spotify isn’t saying anything, and Vanity Fair’s request for more info was not responded to at the time of publication.
But while some might not have predicted that Spotify’s previous top one-day single was a 30-year-old holiday song, it was easy to know that TTPD was going to achieve new heights, and we’re not just talking about her boyfriend’s sell-out merch and podcast (which has made some Spotify chart noise as well). Even before its release, TTPD had Spotify’s most pre-saved album countdown page in history, the company said via press release, so Swift’s dominance this weekend was probably as inevitable as Travis Kelce’s recent gridiron triumph. High times, indeed.