Latest Taylor Swift Album 'Folklore' Sets New Apple Music Streaming Record for a Pop Release
Taylor Swift's new album has achieved a new high for most streamed pop album on Apple Music since its surprise release last week (via Deadline). Folklore set a record for the most streams in a 24-window on the service, reaching 35.47 million plays.
Its success was even more impressive on Spotify, where the singer-songwriter's eighth studio album racked up 79.4 million listens in its first 24 hours of availability, according to Swift's Republic Records label.
Written and recorded remotely during the first few months of the global health crisis, Folklore finds the 30-year-old singer-songwriter teaming up with The National's Aaron Dessner and longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff for a set of ruminative and lo-fi bedroom pop songs.
Since its Thursday release, the album also surpassed 1.3 million global sales in its first twenty-four hours, which should see the album easily debut at No. 1 on the Billboard albums chart, giving it the best showing since Swift's Lover album came out in 2019.
Swift and Apple have famously had a somewhat rocky relationship in previous years, with the artist in 2015 penning an open letter to Apple Music about the service's initial stance on refusing to pay royalties to artists during the three-month free trial period. Swift opposed this aspect of Apple Music, so she decided to keep her 2014 album 1989 off of Apple Music at the time.
Soon after the letter was publicized, Apple reversed course and began paying artists during this period of time when new subscribers are on the free trial of Apple Music. This eventually led to a closer relationship between Swift and Apple, with her music debuting on the service along with the launch of a series of Apple Music ads starring Swift that debuted throughout the spring of 2016.
More recently, last year Swift partnered with Apple in the company's retail store-hosted "Music Lab" sessions, in which customers find out what inspired artists to write their songs.
Popular Stories
Apple will adopt the same rear chassis manufacturing process for the iPhone SE 4 that it is using for the upcoming standard iPhone 16, claims a new rumor coming out of China. According to the Weibo-based leaker "Fixed Focus Digital," the backplate manufacturing process for the iPhone SE 4 is "exactly the same" as the standard model in Apple's upcoming iPhone 16 lineup, which is expected to...
Key details about the overall specifications of the iPhone 17 lineup have been shared by the leaker known as "Ice Universe," clarifying several important aspects of next year's devices. Reports in recent months have converged in agreement that Apple will discontinue the "Plus" iPhone model in 2025 while introducing an all-new iPhone 17 "Slim" model as an even more high-end option sitting...
Apple typically releases its new iPhone series around mid-September, which means we are about two months out from the launch of the iPhone 16. Like the iPhone 15 series, this year's lineup is expected to stick with four models – iPhone 16, iPhone 16 Plus, iPhone 16 Pro, and iPhone 16 Pro Max – although there are plenty of design differences and new features to take into account. To bring ...
Apple is scaling back its Hollywood spending after investing over $20 billion in original programming with limited success, Bloomberg reports. This shift comes after the streaming service, which launched in 2019, struggled to capture a significant share of the market, accounting for only 0.2% of TV viewership in the U.S., compared to Netflix's 8%. Despite heavy investment, critical acclaim,...
Last Friday, a major CrowdStrike outage impacted PCs running Microsoft Windows, causing worldwide issues affecting airlines, retailers, banks, hospitals, rail networks, and more. Computers were stuck in continuous recovery loops, rendering them unusable. The failure was caused by an update to the CrowdStrike Falcon antivirus software that auto-installed on Windows 10 PCs, but Mac and Linux...
