Taylor Swift’s ‘Folklore’ Album Exceeds 1.3 Million Sales in 24 Hours
The album’s performance broke the record for first-day album streams by a female artist on Spotify.
Republic Records report that Taylor Swift’s latest album, Folklore, has sold over 1.3 million copies globally in 24 hours.
On Spotify it was streamed 80.6 million times, breaking the record for first-day album streams by a female artist. Folklore was also the most streamed pop album on Apple Music on its first day of release, with 35.47 million streams.
Folklore, which is Swift’s eighth studio album, dropped at midnight on Thursday — a surprise to her fans — alongside a music video for the track “Cardigan.” Among her collaborators, indie folk band Bon Iver appears with Swift on the track “exile.”
On social media, Swift also shared her vision for the album. “It started with imagery. Visuals that popped into my mind and piqued my curiosity. Stars drawn around scars. A cardigan that still bears the scent of loss twenty years later. Battleships sinking into the ocean, down, down, down. The tree swing in the woods of my childhood.”
Swift went on to write that the images in her head “grew faces or names and became characters” in the writing process. “I found myself not only writing my own stories, but also writing about or form the perspective of people I’ve never met, people I’ve known, or those I wish I hadn’t.”
The singer later wrote that, in isolation, her imagination has “run wild” and this album is the result, “a collection of songs and stories that flowed like a stream of consciousness.”
Folklore arrived less than a year after her seventh studio album Lover was released on August 30, 2019, her first in a multi-album deal with Universal Music Group. Lover has been certified platinum by the RIAA and crossed the one million mark in U.S. consumption in under two weeks, and selling more albums in 48 hours than any album last year. It also earned the title of highest-selling album of 2019, and achieved “the biggest first-week total for any album since her own Reputation in 2017,” according to Billboard.
Folklore is out now and can be bought here.
Arthur O.
July 27, 2020 at 11:30 am
This is going to sell no matter what. Personally I hate it. The sound of it is a lot like an old Imogen Heap album…Ellipse. So Strike One. The lyrics are derivative and make an attempt to be profound and still fail due to being trendy and littered with obscenity because that is what has become au courant with the rap crowd…which she desperately was trying to fuse in with some of her work in recent years VERY unsuccessfully..Strike Two. She is thirty years old and she still has the whiny arrested development of a child of great privilege…that whole “I am so misunderstood, even though I sell millions, why do so many people hate me? I am a modern woman and I have a posse and I don’t like it when I don’t get my way” thing going. Strike Three She is still pitch corrected. She is still praised by her fans because we live in a society where people think Kanye West is a genius. Hence…no depth, no substance, out of her depth in a parking lot puddle. To add insult to injury, a bevy of critics have had the audacity to insanely compare her to Joni Mitchell who over the course of fifty years has affected countless artists worldwide. All Swift has done is have a career bought and sold from the get go by big investment money. The public will buy cheap hamburger if they don’t know what how filet mignon tastes. Even Billie Eilish in her teens is doing much better work than Swift. Ms. S continues to attempt to be relevant while the unsuspecting public who buy what they are told these days, praising without thinking and never noticing it is almost exactly like the other records they are buying. Furthermore that public don’t seem to make any real searches for anything outside of that ridiculous paradigm. Once in a blue moon something out of the norm appears because some brave corporate junior marketing guy takes a bold chance putting his job on the line. In other words….this is boring crap just like all the other boring crap she has done….homogenized cloned music that is comped and tuned and put out by her PR people. She has not shown any growth…just a desire to want to clone what others do. I fully expect her PR people and the label to bury this comment.
James Trutor
July 28, 2020 at 11:38 am
But you still listened to it!! Job done by them.
kittiegirl
September 7, 2020 at 10:23 am
I think the album is incredible. I loved it. Exile is the best song in my opinion.