Taylor Swift‘s The Tortured Poets Department is now the only album in Spotify history to surpass one billion streams in a single week, the streaming service announced Wednesday (April 24) — and it only needed five days to do it.
The pop star’s 11th studio record arrived at midnight Friday (April 19), bringing with it 16 new songs, including lead single “Fortnight” featuring Post Malone. Exactly two hours later, Swift nearly doubled the length of the tracklist with the surprise release of 15 more titles as part of an Anthology extended edition of the album.
Since then, Tortured Poets has raked in more than a billion listens across its 31 tracks on Spotify, the fastest LP to ever do so.
The milestone marks only the latest record Swift has set with the new album over the past few days, with Tortured Poets recently becoming Spotify’s most streamed album in a single day with more than 300 million streams accumulated in its first 24 hours of availability. Similarly, “Fortnight” set a new precedent for most single-day streams amongst individual songs on the platform.
Tortured Poets also earned more first-day streams than any other pop album in Apple Music history upon its release. Plus, with 800,000 vinyl copies sold in the LP’s first four days on the market, TTPD broke Swift’s own record for the largest sales week for an album on vinyl in the modern era, beating the 693,000 sold of 1989 (Taylor’s Version) in its first week.
“This period of the author’s life is now over, the chapter closed and boarded up,” Swift wrote of her latest project on Instagram upon its release. “There is nothing to avenge, no scores to settle once wounds have healed. And upon further reflection, a good number of them turned out to be self-inflicted. This writer is of the firm belief that our tears become holy in the form of ink on a page. Once we have spoken our saddest story, we can be free of it.”
See Spotify’s announcement below.
