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The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
Entertainment
Benjamin Lee

Taylor Swift hits 1bn Spotify streams in a week with Tortured Poets Department

Taylor Swift on tour in Singapore
Taylor Swift on tour in Singapore. Photograph: Ashok Kumar/TAS24/Getty Images for TAS Rights Management

Taylor Swift’s new album The Tortured Poets Department has become the first to reach 1bn Spotify streams in a week.

The platform announced on X that with two days to go, it had become the “most-streamed album in a single week” and had surpassed a billion with the exact number undisclosed.

After its release on 19 April, the 31-track album became Spotify’s most streamed in a single day.

Swift has overtaken herself with the latest record which she previously held with Midnights. That album was estimated to have generated over $230m for her label Universal in 2022.

Complete sales and streaming figures for the new album will be released on Thursday but it was revealed that 1.5m copies of the album had already been sold including 700,000 vinyl copies, a record in itself.

Reviews have been mixed with the Guardian’s Alexis Petridis praising Swift’s “exceptionally talented” writing in a four-star rave yet a Paste Magazine review highlighted “a striking level of moral nothingness” on a “hollow” album.

Swift called it “an anthology of new works that reflect events, opinions and sentiments from a fleeting and fatalistic moment in time” in an Instagram statement.

Swift will spend the rest of the year on her Eras tour including dates in England and Canada. The tour has already become the first to make over $1bn in revenue. Earlier this month, Forbes announced that Swift had now become a billionaire.

The singer-songwriter is also expected to make her debut as a feature-length film-maker with an as-yet-untitled film with Searchlight. Last year saw the release of her concert film Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour which made over $260m worldwide. It’s now the highest-grossing concert film ever released. The Guardian’s Adrian Horton called it “stupefyingly grand”.

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