Swift Streams Smash Records

The first single from Taylor Swift’s forthcoming album has smashed Spotify and YouTube records, clocking up 8m streams and over 19m views in its opening day.

‘Look What you Made Me Do’ was released at 11.30pm (ET) on August 24^th, going on to surpass the 6.87m streams attracted by Ed Sheeran’s ‘Shape Of You’ in its first 24 hours on the platform in January this year.

Despite this, it should be noted that Swift has not beaten Sheeran’s biggest 24 hours- at the height of its utter ubiquity, ‘Shape of You’ was clocking in over 10m streams in a 24 hour period.

LWYMMD is also Number One on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, also breaking the highest weekly US streaming and sales sums for a track in 2017 alongside breaking the record for the most weekly streams ever for a song by a female artist. The track surpassed the debut week for Adele’s ‘Hello’, which reached 61.6m in November 2015.

The track reached 84.4m US streams in the week ending August 31^st according to Nielsen Music.

Swift’s new album ‘Reputation’ is scheduled for release on November 10^th via Big Machine, with its initial tracks proving divisive amongst critics- with some quarters questioning Swift’s seeming fixation on settling personal scores and essentially fiddling whilst Rome burns.

What were they expecting- The Times They Are a-Changin?