Just How Big is a Taylor Swift Album Drop?
The quintessential pop star has the impact of five Hip Hop icons combined. And Spotify data shows Taylor's impact simply keeps on growing.
I have bad news for anyone hoping America had already reached peak Taylor.
Sometime shortly after you ate lunch on Monday, Taylor Swift broke her previous Spotify weekly streaming record—with half of the week left to keep growing it.
It’s ironic for an artist who pulled all her material off Spotify until 2017.
By the end of the day Monday, April 22nd, 2024, The Tortured Poets Department’s release had already helped generate 368 million plays of Taylor Swift tracks on Spotify for the week, surpassing the record Midnights took an entire week to set in 2022.
To understand just how impactful a Taylor Swift album release is on America’s music consumption, let’s dive into how her Spotify streaming has developed over the past few years.
ALBUM DEBUTS REFLECT THE SIZE AND PASSION OF THE FANS
When an artist with a legion of passionate fans releases new material, those fans flock to streaming to sample that artist’s latest. When it’s a true superstar, those passionate fans actually find new time to listen to it, increasing overall streaming music consumption.
There are passionate fans and then there are Swifties.
We’ll now examine Spotify data for the past five years and zone in on those weeks when the total plays for Spotify’s 200 biggest songs increased most compared to the previous week. In every single case, those weekly streaming jumps stem from a big artist releasing a new project. A superstar’s new album release can generate well over 100 million new streams a week that simply wouldn’t have happened without those artist fans binge-sampling the new album.
And for five of the top 10 weeks when Spotify streaming spiked most compared to the previous week, there’s a Taylor Swift album release to thank for that week to week streaming spike:
TAYLOR SWIFT: FROM SUPERSTAR TO MEGASTAR
Now, let’s zone in on only Taylor Swift’s weekly streams over the last five years. You’ll see major spikes every time she releases a new album. With each new album, Taylor generates more weekly Spotify plays than she did with each previous project. 2022’s Midnights garnered Swift almost three times as many Spotify plays the week it dropped than did the release of Lover in 2019.
And while her “Taylor’s Version” re-recordings don’t generate quite as many Spotify plays as her brand-new material (although they’re still huge releases), those re-recordings have also grown with each new release.
Zooming out to a yearly view, Swift’s total Spotify streams for 2023 (for songs in the weekly Spotify 200 chart) more than doubled her 2022 streaming.
To quantify Taylor Swift’s impact another way, here’s how each Swift album release impacted the overall total plays for all artists and titles on the weekly Spotify 200. Swifties are so powerful, they increase the time people devote to streaming music that week.
How do those Taylor album releases compare to the other impactful album drops?
The leading non-Taylor artists are all Hip Hop or R&B performers. Taylor Swift may be a pop sensation, but she streams like a Hip Hop icon.
The additional streams these artists generate when they release albums—while impressive—still falls short of the boost in streaming Swift generates.
The five non-Taylor releases that created the 10 biggest weekly jumps in streaming percentages tend to fall during periods when other big artists also release new projects. Whether it’s clever timing on Taylor’s part, or if other artists simply don’t want to compete with her, Taylor Swift tends to have her major release periods all to herself.
TORTURED POETS SET NEW RECORDS
Which brings us to The Tortured Poets Department, released on Friday April 19th. As I write this post, I only have data for the first five days of the album’s release week. Even with two days left to go, those tortured poets have already given Taylor her biggest week in the Spotify 200 ever, with over 430 million streams in the U.S. compared to 354 million track plays the week Midnights dropped in 2022.
I’ve estimated the impact The Tortured Poets Department will likely have on total weekly streams on the Spotify 200. If those estimates hold, it is not only poised to be the biggest album debut in U.S. Spotify history, but it could also be the biggest week of streaming on Spotify in the U.S. ever.
DOES A STRONG DEBUT MEAN INSTANTLY HUGE HITS?
As I discussed in my previous post, a song only becomes a mass appeal cultural phenomenon when it develops a large passive fan base. Passive fans are the folks who don’t seek out a song, but gradually grow to know and love it when they hear it repeatedly and unintentionally. Passive fandom drives the songs that work for radio.
Additionally, this week’s record-breaking streaming performance for The Tortured Poets Department’s debut has little to do with the merit of the music on this album. After all, you haven’t even heard it yet when you first stream it.
Instead, this week’s record-breaking Spotify streaming has everything to do with expectations Swift has built based on her previous album Midnights, her Eras tour, and her overtime victory in Super Bowl LIV.
(For a detailed analysis of why an album’s initial performance is a referendum on the artist’s previous release, listen to music journalist and chart expert Chris Molanphy’s Hit Parade podcast episode The AC/DC Rule.)
If “Fortnight” (which sadly isn’t about Fortnite) is still garnering around half as many streams per week in early June as it gets this debut week, it has become a mass appeal hit in its own right. Such a level of streaming retention indicates the kind of song that a majority of listeners in callout research say they love.
If, on the other hand, Fortnight’s weekly plays in ten weeks are less than 20 percent as strong as its debut week, we can conclude the song has failed to catch on based on its own merit. That’s the kind of song radio listeners rate “meh” in callout.
Naturally, I’d be flabbergasted if any Top 40 or Adult Contemporary station waited for proof listeners want to hear Taylor Swift’s latest single. I’ve long argued that radio needs to re-embrace promoting new music, instead of waiting for proof in callout research that listeners already love it after they’ve already played it on Spotify for weeks.
Solely on cultural relevance, a new Swift single should go straight to heavy rotation.
Ultimately, the key test to whether or not people truly love the tracks on The Tortured Poets Department won’t be revealed in how many people play it this week, but rather in whether or not people keep on streaming these songs week after week.
Sources for this post:
Spotify Charts (daily charts for USA for 4/15/2024 through 4/23/2024): https://charts.spotify.com/charts/view/regional-us-daily/2024-04-23
Spotify Charts (weekly charts for the U.S.A. for 1/1/2019 through 4/14/2024): https://charts.spotify.com/charts/overview/us