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At this point, it’s difficult to talk about Taylor Swift without coming off like a business reporter who’s breathlessly extolling some company’s perpetually skyrocketing stock price. Swift’s commercial success is so far beyond anything that her peers have managed that it doesn’t feel fair to compare anyone else to her. Case in point: Swift’s new album The Tortured Poets Department is five days old, and it has yet to appear on a Billboard chart. Its reception, among both fans and critics, has been fairly muted. It’s still already the biggest-selling album of 2024.
According to a press release from Republic, Taylor Swift’s label, it took 48 hours for The Tortured Poets Department to become 2024’s highest-selling album “across both consumption and pure sales in the US.” In the album’s first 24 hours, Swift got 380 million streams, the biggest one-day total for a single artist in Spotify history. The album got a billion streams before any other album ever, and the Post Malone collab “Fortnight” had more streams in a day than any other song in Spotify history.
Along the way, Taylor Swift became the first artist ever to rack up 100 million album equivalent units, and she got five million of them this year. When next week’s Billboard charts come out, it’s likely that Swift will take up the entire top 10, and it won’t even be the first time that she’s done that. So yeah. Taylor Swift. Pretty popular.