Leave it to Taylor Swift to break YouTube and Spotify records with an album that isn’t even pop. The 30-year-old Bad Blood singer surprise dropped an album this week and it has already become one of her biggest.
The album was sold 1.3 million times in just a day around the world. Over on the digital side of things, Swift has proven that she doesn’t need to use the popularity of pop or country music to sell albums with folklore breaking records on nearly every streaming service.
‘Folklore’ has now set the global record for first-day album streams on streaming service 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 (no figures have been shared). Her album has already crossed the 200 million views mark on Spotify as of right now, the fastest for any female album ever.
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Folklore’s 16 tracks have also boast the biggest opening numbers for her album to debut on YouTube. She also received a boost on Instagram followers as well as YouTube subscribers, pushing her number to 39 million subs.
https://twitter.com/Swift_Charts13/status/1286938785213747200?s=20
Folklore’s Mounting Accolades
Elsewhere Swift is also getting the best reviews of her career. Her album currently stands at a 94% on metacritic, which is a critic aggregator site. The Guardian gave it 5/5 stars as did Entertainment Weekly, Variety and Telegraph. Others such as Pitchfork, LA Times, Rolling Stone, Uproxx and Paste also commended Swift’s record.
Wrote about @taylorswift13's fantastic new album for @UPROXX, as well as the need for big communal virtual moments when we can't have them IRL, pretension in the indie music scene, and the dudes "finally giving her a chance" https://t.co/jnZzmpXOIW
— Philip Cosores (@Philip_Cosores) July 27, 2020
So strong is the acclaim for this album that within a week of its arrival, critics are claiming that Taylor Swift’s Folklore will sweep the 2021 Grammy Awards in all major categories including Album of the Year, Record of The Year and Song Of The Year. Previous front runners for some of these categories included albums by Dua Lipa, Lady Gaga, The Weeknd, Post Malone, Selena Gomez and Halsey. However, now Folklore is the album to beat.
Taylor Swift’s Folklore came on the heels of Lover, an album that was critically lauded though fell short of expectations with its two singles managing to hit no 2 and not reach the coveted Billboard Hot 100 #1 position.
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Her single off of Folklore though, seems to be having no problem acing as it is expected to debut atop the Billboard chart. Swift released the video for the indie song with her album and has more than 25 million views. The music video cracked the #40 position on YouTube trends in Pakistan when it premiered.
Taylor Swift’s new sound has been the subject of much conversation online, with much of the weekend being spent dissecting her lyrics.
All this buzz only proves how big her stardom has gotten, and how little she is trapped by genres and traditionally popular sounds. Her new album sees her embrace alternative-indie genres and is a far cry from the sugary pop songs that have defined the past decade.