Taylor Swift’s folklore album breaks streaming records

‘Folklore’, Taylor Swift’s new album, has already broken a string of streaming records.

The 30-year-old singer’s ‘folklore’ was released at short notice – but that hasn’t stopped the album from entering the record books.

‘Folklore’ sold over 1.3 million copies around the world within the first 24 hours of its release. The album also broke records on Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Music.

‘Folklore’ has created a new record for first day album streams on Spotify by a female artist, having prompted 80.6 million streams.

Similarly, the record has also become the most-streamed album on Apple Music in 24 hours, achieving 35.47 million streams in a single day with new streaming records too in the US and worldwide on amazon music.

A mere 11 months passed between the release of Lover and its surprise follow-up, but it feels like a lifetime. Written and recorded remotely during the first few months of the global pandemic, folklore finds the 30-year-old singer-songwriter teaming up with The National’s Aaron Dessner and long-time collaborator Jack Antonoff for a set of ruminative and relatively lo-fi bedroom pop that’s worlds away from its predecessor.

When Swift opens “the 1”—a sly hybrid of plaintive piano and her naturally bouncy delivery—with “I’m doing good, I’m on some new s**t,” you’d be forgiven for thinking it was another update from quarantine, or a comment on her broadening sensibilities. But Swift’s channelled her considerable energies into writing songs here that double as short stories and character studies, from Proustian flashbacks (“cardigan”, which bears shades of Lana Del Rey) to outcast widows (“the last great american dynasty”) and doomed relationships (“exile”, a heavy-hearted duet with Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon).

It’s a work of great texture and imagination. “Your braids like a pattern/Love you to the moon and to Saturn,” she sings on “seven”, the tale of two friends plotting an escape. “Passed down like folk songs, the love lasts so long.”

Meanwhile, Taylor recently revealed she didn’t even tell her friends she was making ‘folklore’.

The chart-topping star surprised her fans by unveiling her eighth studio album on Thursday evening, and admitted she made a concerted effort to remain tight-lipped about the project.

During a fan Q&A, she explained: “No one knew I was making an album.

“I didn’t even tell my friends until right before announce. It was my own secret world I’d go to and I’ve never made music like that before.”

Aaron Dessner – who worked with Taylor on her new album – even kept it a secret from his daughter.

He said: “I have an eight-year-old daughter and one day she asked me. She’s just like, ‘Daddy, do you know Taylor Swift?’

“It was the morning after we’d written like one of these songs. And every time we would write a song, it was like a weird lightning bolt, getting this struck by lightning or something and just like exhilarated with electricity.

“I just looked her straight in the eye and said, ‘No.’ I honoured my confidentiality. But yeah, it was important to keep it.”

For a songwriter who has mined so much great detail from a life lived largely in public, it only makes sense that she’d eventually find inspiration in isolation..