For years, Taylor Swift avoided Spotify like the plague, but now that she’s back, she’s proving just how massive a force she can be on the streaming giant she once shunned.
The one-time country music darling has just broken a recently set record on the Swedish platform with her new single “Look What You Made Me Do,” which dropped just minutes before midnight on Friday. The song, which is dividing fans and critics all around the world (but at least everyone is listening), was played just under 8 million times on Friday alone, according to Music Business Worldwide. That many streams in a single 24-hour period is enough to topple the previous record-holder, Ed Sheeran’s “Shape Of You.” The tropical pop song and 12-week No. 1 blockbuster racked up 6.87 million plays in its first full day of availability, which now stands as the second-most streams in just a day.
It is important to note that the record Swift just smashed with her latest pop tune is for the biggest opening day for any song, not any 24-hour period. That particular feat is still claimed by Ed Sheeran's "Shape," which went on to rack up even more plays days after it initially debuted.
While it’s not surprising that a new Swift single that was as hotly anticipated as “Look What You Made Me Do” is breaking records and being played non-stop by millions of people around the globe, it is somewhat funny to see her doing so on Spotify. Around the time she released her last album, 1989, in 2014, the Grammy winner penned an op-ed that appeared in the Wall Street Journal explaining why she was pulling her entire catalog from Spotify. She didn’t mince her words in denouncing the site and demanded that all artists be paid a livable wage for their art.
Well, things have changed since she first refused to allow those utilizing the platform’s free tier to hear her music, and just earlier this summer she came around and decided she could no longer be missing from the streaming site, which is powerful enough to make or break new music and which can help push a track or album to the top of the charts these days. Swift needs Spotify streams to ensure her new collection hits the same highs as her previous works, and with this many plays in just a day, she's well on her way to another claiming another chart-topper.
