Taylor Swift breaks Spotify single-day streaming record

Red (Taylor’s Version) was released to great fanfare

Taylor Swift has broken two Spotify records with the release of Red (Taylor’s Version) on Friday (Nov 12th). The country-turned-pop star broke the record for the most-streamed album in a day by a female and the most-streamed female in a single day in Spotify history.

The first record saw the Red (Taylor’s Version) rack up 90.8 million streams on Friday, breaking her previous record of 78.7 million with Folklore in July 2020. The second record saw Swift streamed 122.9 million times on Friday.

Red (Taylor’s Version) was moved up a week from its initial November 19th release date, rumored due to Adele’s 30 release this week. It’s the second of six of her re-recorded albums, but was her fourth studio album in 2012.

Swift supported the release with back to back appearances on The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon and Late Night With Seth Meyers. On Saturday, she performed a 10 minute version of “All Too Well,” one of the vault songs that was left off of the original project, on Saturday Night Live, breaking the traditional cycle of artists performing two songs during the show. She also released a 15 minute All Too Well short film that has racked up nearly 30 million views in two days. Swift co-wrote  and directed the film that stars Dylan O’Brien (Teen Wolf, Maze Runner) and Sadie Sink (Stranger Things, American Odyssey) who play love interests that eventually go through a painful breakup. Swift stars as the older version of “Her,” 13 years later.

This morning (Mon, Nov 15th), Swift released the video for “I Bet You Think About Me,” also another vault song that features Chris Stapleton on background vocals. The six minute clip, which she co-wrote with actress Blake Lively and was directed by The Shallows actress in her directorial debut, finds Swift crashing the wedding of an ex-boyfriend, played by Miles Teller (War Dogs, Divergent, Only the Brave) and turning everything red.

“The song, ‘I Bet You Think About Me’ – this is a song I wrote with Lori McKenna, who is one of my favorite singer-songwriters ever,” Swift shares. “I’d always wanted to work with her, and I wrote this with her at her house when I was playing Foxboro Stadium on the Speak Now Tour. We wanted this song to be like a comedic, tongue-in-cheek, funny, not caring what anyone thinks about you sort of breakup song, because there are a lot of different types of breakup songs on Red. Some of them are very sincere; some of them very stoic and heartbreaking and sad. We wanted this to be the moment like where I don’t care about anything. (laughs) And we wanted to kind of make people laugh with it, and we wanted it to be sort of a drinking song. I think that’s what it ended up being.”

Earlier this year, Swift released Fearless (Taylor’s Version)her 2008 sophomore album that was the first in the re-recording series. Upon its release, Swift broke records when it landed at No. 1 around the world, marking the first time a woman has landed three No. 1 albums in less than a year with the releases of Folklore and Evermore.

With the arrival of Fearless (Taylor’s Version), Swift extended an unprecedented record, standing out as the only artist in history to release nine albums with sales of at least 500,000 copies in a single week [Fearless, Speak Now, RED, 1989, Reputation, Lover, Folklore, Evermore, and now, Fearless (Taylor’s Version)].

Swift broke a 54 year record held by The Beatles in the United Kingdom for the fastest accumulation of three No. 1 albums. Swift captured her third chart-topping album in a span of 259 days with Fearless (Taylor’s Version), which follows Folklore on July 31st and Evermore on December 18th.

In September, Swift surprised dropped a newly recorded version of “Wildest Dreams” from her 1989 album which has yet to be announced.

Swift is currently in the midst of releasing re-recorded versions of her first six studio albums following a public feud with her former label, Big Machine Label Group. Her original masters were part of the sale of Big Machine in 2019 when Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings LLC purchased the label. Braun then sold Swift’s Big Machine catalog masters to Shamrock Holdings for upwards of $300 million in 2019. Swift has been at odds with the label, founder Scott Borchetta and Braun over the past couple of years as she’s attempted to purchase the masters to no avail while also being caught up in live performing rights of the same songs.

Buddy Iahn
Buddy Iahn

Buddy Iahn founded The Music Universe when he decided to juxtapose his love of web design and music. As a lifelong drummer, he decided to take a hiatus from playing music to report it. The website began as a fun project in 2013 to one of the top independent news sites. Email: info@themusicuniverse.com