Taylor Swift (PC: Getty Images)
Another day, another record broken by Taylor Swift. In less than 12 hours, Swift’s new The Tortured Poets Department double album has become Spotify’s most streamed album in a single day in 2024 so far, Spotify confirms. The 31-track set snags the honor from the previous record-holder, Beyoncé’s Billboard 200-topping Cowboy Carter LP, which ultimately earned 300.41 million on-demand official streams in its first full week of release.
The Tortured Poets Department serves as Swift’s eleventh studio album; it’s also her first album of new music since 2022’s Grammy-winning Midnights. The album also features collaborations with Florence + the Machine and Post Malone, as well as writing and production contributions from Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner.
Taylor Swift becomes the most streamed artist in a single day
Taylor Swift has set new Spotify records with her 11th studio album, The Tortured Poets Department. Spotify confirmed to PEOPLE that Swift became the most streamed artist and album in a single day, with the top three most streamed albums in Spotify history being The Tortured Poets Department, Midnights, and 1989 (Taylor’s Version).
Before the album was released, Swift broke Spotify’s record for the most pre-saved countdown page album in the streaming company’s history. The Cruel Summer singer then surprised fans by releasing 15 additional songs two hours after its midnight debut.
“It’s a 2am surprise: The Tortured Poets Department is a secret DOUBLE album. I’d written so much tortured poetry in the past 2 years and wanted to share it all with you, so here’s the second installment of TTPD: The Anthology. 15 extra songs. And now the story isn’t mine anymore… it’s all yours,” announced Swift on Instagram.
The album, which fans have discovered to be inspired by her exes Matty Healy, Joe Alwyn, and her current boyfriend Travis Kelce is Swift’s most personal project to date.
“The Tortured Poets Department. An anthology of new works that reflect events, opinions and sentiments from a fleeting and fatalistic moment in time – one that was both sensational and sorrowful in equal measure. This period of the author’s life is now over, the chapter closed and boarded up,” Swift shared on Instagram after its release.
A brief about The Tortured Poet Department
Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department consists of sixteen standard songs and features two guest acts, the American rapper Post Malone on the lead single Fortnight and the English indie rock band Florence and the Machine, led by singer-songwriter Florence Welch, on the song Florida!!!.
The album was primarily written by Swift with longtime collaborators Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner; Welch and Malone also co-wrote their respective collaborations with Swift. Billboard opined that The Tortured Poets Department is modeled after the five stages of grief, a psychological theory proposed by Swiss-American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in 1969, as speculated by a number of fans, with knowingly messy, wildly unguarded songwriting.
Critics described the standard edition as a synth-pop album whose mid-tempo production incorporates prominent synths and drum machines. Several tracks feature a more stripped-down instrumentation, driven by piano or guitar, with stylings of rock and folk. Swift mostly sings in her lower vocal register to deliver rap-like, conversational verses.
The Guardian’s Alexis Petridis wrote that its sound “splits the difference between the glossy 80s-influenced pop-rock of 1989 and the small-hours understatement of Midnights”. Writing for The Times, Will Hodgkinson described the album as an amalgam of synth-pop, 1980s power ballads, and “the emotional AOR of Stevie Nicks.”
The second part of the double album, subtitled The Anthology, mostly consists of piano ballads that are instrumented with Dessner’s picked acoustic guitar, soft piano, and subtle synths. According to the BBC’s Mark Savage, this second half features a more acoustic, folk sound similar to Swift’s 2020 albums, Folklore and Evermore.
