Not to sound like a broken record, but if there was a record for breaking records, Taylor Swift would have already broken that record. She’s has ticked off milestones that few of her peers could even dream of achieving, from the highest-grossing concert tour of all time for her seemingly endless The Eras tour to simply being the highest-earning female musician in the industry.
Oh, she is also the only person to receive the Grammy for Album of the Year four times and is also the only person in history to appear on a Time Magazine cover with her very own cat. Now, the “Shake It Off Singer” has clasped yet another impressive feat, with news breaking today that Swift has become the first female artist in history to surpass 90 billion streams on Spotify.
Perhaps we should’ve known, given that the Swiftie fanbase is strong enough to beat Thanos, that such a milestone was on the horizon, but amassing the equivalent of around eleven times the world’s population in streams surpasses even the most diehard fan’s expectations. The feat places Swift as the fourth most-listened to artist on Spotify, though she trails just behind Drake, who has surpassed 100 billion streams on the platform.
The achievement is awe-inspiring for Swift given that, in 2014, she pulled most of her catalog from Spotify in retaliation to the streamer’s effect on physical album sales. Swift reintroduced her music back to the platform in 2017, so there’s a pretty decent chunk of time where she went streamless and still managed to crack 90 billion this year.
Much of this streaming success can be boiled down to Swift’s masterful release strategies which, for albums like her most recent The Tortured Poets Department, have seen her drop multiple variations, deluxe editions, and versions of the songs on the tracklist. While some have taken this strategy as an attempt to ‘gamify’ the industry and bolster numbers — and in doing so, block other albums, like Billie Eilish’s Hit Me Hard and Soft, from reaching number one — we think Swift is probably just laughing all the way to the bank.
Speaking of the bank, Swift has broken records in the (tortured poets) department, too. Last year, the pop star again made history when Forbes reported that she had become a billionaire, and was the highest-paid female for 2023. Swift’s history-making efforts seem to have rubbed off on her peers, since Sabrina Carpenter — who is something of a Swift protege and opened for her on the Eras Tour — this week became the first solo artist to have her first top five singles occupy three spots on the Billboard Hot 100.
That, folks, is what we like to call true “mother” behavior, with many Swifties flocking to social media to share their support. “She coming for 100 billion at the end of the year,” one fan predicted, with another adding that “she’s the music industry for a reason.”
We couldn’t agree more.
Published: Sep 6, 2024 04:13 am