By Chris Willman
Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic
Spotify announced Wednesday that Taylor Swift‘s “The Tortured Poets Department” has become the first album in the app’s history to pick up a billion streams in a single week. And it did that with still a couple of days left to go in the seven-day period in question.
The previous high-water mark for most album streams in a week belonged to Swift’s last all-new release, “Midnights,” in October 2022. Spotify did not release a specific figure when it announced at the time that “Midnights” had broken the record, but observers adding the numbers through publicly available Spotify data at the time estimated the figure to be in the 700,000s.
On April 22, 2024, Taylor Swift's THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT became Spotify’s most-streamed album in a single week. The album has surpassed 1 Billion streams since release.
That “Tortured Poets” is setting new Spotify records five days into its run is not a surprise. Previously, the DSP had announced that the album had surpassed 300 million streams in just its first day out.
Overall sales-and-streaming figures won’t become official till the chart week wraps up at the close of day Thursday and Luminate reports results on Sunday. But projections are that the new album will easily surpass 2 million in album-equivalent units, which would be the highest numbers by far for any album since Adele released “25” nine years ago.
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Luminate and Billboard reported that “The Tortured Poets Department” had already become the bestselling vinyl release in a single week in the modern era by selling 700,000 LP copies in its first three days of release, with four days left to go in the week. That number is the highest since accurate records for sales began to be collected by SoundScan in 1991.
As far as Spotify alone goes, the service has reported several record-breaking feats for Swift since the album came out, prior to Wednesday’s billion news.
Several single-day records were announced by Spotify after the album’s first day in circulation. The single “Fortnight,” which features Post Malone, became the most-streamed song in a single day in Spotify history on its first day of release. “Tortured Poets” similarly set a record at that time for the service’s most-streamed album in one day, and Swift became the artist accruing the most streams in a day for Spotify.
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