Taylor Swift’s “Speak Now (Taylor’s Version)” is not just a one-day streaming wonder. Yes, it did hit the highest single-day numbers for Spotify so far this year when it came out Friday. But as of Monday evening, not quite 96 hours into the new album’s release, Swift is so thoroughly dominating the streaming world that she holds 23 of the top 50 slots on the Spotify U.S. Top 50. That includes all 22 of the newly released songs, plus the resurgent “Cruel Summer.”
Her domination is nearly that complete globally, too. On Spotify’s Global Top 50 at the same hour Monday night, Swift held down a third of that chart’s 50 spots, with 17 songs represented.
The “Speak Now” remake is obviously driving most of that action, yet one of the curiosities of this uniquely Swiftian summer is the comeback of 2019’s “Cruel Summer,” which is the singer’s top track on the global chart at the moment, at No. 3, just ahead of the new album’s “I Can See You (From the Vault)” at No. 4.
Republic has been promoting the relative oldie from the “Lover” album to radio as a Song of the Summer candidate, and it’s working — “Cruel Summer” leaped into the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100, as of Monday, landing at No. 7, with 30.3 million airplay audience impressions and just shy of 15 million streams. That gives Swift two songs in Billboard’s top 10 at the moment, with the remix of “Karma” (with Ice Spice), from the “Midnights” album, still hanging in at No. 9. It’s not impossible that when the next Hot 100 comes out in a week, “I Can See You (From the Vault)” could join the other two and Swift would accomplish the feat of having three songs from three different albums in the top 10.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves yet. What Swift is accomplishing on the Spotify chart right now is impressive enough, especially when a new album has been out for a few days and initial fan hysteria has died down.
On the U.S. Spotify chart, just under four days into the new album’s run, Swift’s top song at the moment is “I Can See You (From the Vault),” trailing only Olivia Rodrigo’s No. 1 “Vampire.” The song might have become the fan favorite among the six Vault tracks from “Speak Now (Taylor’s Version)” even if she hadn’t released an attention-getting music video late Friday night that features her reuniting with long-ago ex-boyfriend Taylor Lautner and the now-grown stars of her 2010 “Mean” music video.
Swift has six songs in Spotify’s U.S. top 10, with “I Can See You” followed by the “Taylor’s Version” remakes of “Back to December,” “Mine,” “Enchanted” and “Sparks Fly” at Nos. 5, 6, 7 and 10, and “Lover’s” “Cruel Summer” at No. 8.
On top of that, her songs add up to 18 out of the top 25. The second most popular Vault track after “IU Can See You” is “Castles Crumbling,” her duet with Paramore’s Hayley Williams, at No. 11. Sitting just behind that at No. 12 is the new version of “Better Than Revenge” that includes a polarizingly updated lyric.
Spotify has not officially announced a lot of Swift-related stats, other than to point out that the new album had the biggest single streaming day of 2023 on Friday, and that it also set a single-day streaming record for a country album. (Probably not a huge percentage of fans thinks of “Speak Now” — either the old version or the re-recorded one — as country per se, given that she had well moved on to pop dominance by 2010, but that’s how it’s classified, not as pop, for Spotify and many other chart purposes.)
But several fan-driven accounts keep close track of Swift’s Spotify accomplishments and produce their own charts comparing the artist’s current success to others’ — and to her own.
The independent Twitter account Taylor Swift Charts(@chartstswift) points out that “Speak Now (Taylor’s Version)” produced the second best Spotify numbers for a female artist in a single day in that app’s history, at 126.4 million streams — a number previously only bested by Swift herself, when “Midnights” accumulated a record-breaking 184.7 million streams in its first day last fall.
According to this account’s tabulations, on a list of the 20 best single days for female artists’ albums in Spotify history, Swift has 18 of those 20 spots, with only blockbuster first days for a couple of Ariana Grande albums keeping her from having a clean sweep. (Spotify reps said they could not verify this raking, but Taylor Swift Charts has a good record for record-keeping.)
With several days left in the weekly chart cycle, Hits Daily Double is projecting that “Speak Now (Taylor’s Version)” will debut with 650,000 to 700,000 units, which would be the best album debut of 2023 so far — eclipsing even the 501,000-unit first week for Morgan Wallen’s blockbuster “One Thing at a Time.”
If that 650K+ estimate pans out, it will be no match for Swift’s most recent all-new album, “Midnights,” which bowed last October with more than 1.1 million units. But it would be the biggest debut of her three re-recordings to date. “Red (Taylor’s Version)” came out of the gate with 605,000 units in late 2021, and “Fearless (Taylor’s Version)” debuted with 291,000 earlier that same year.
In the U.K., Swift is expected to have three songs from two albums in the Official Singles Chart top 10 by week’s end, according to mid-week projections. “Mine (Taylor’s Version)” was reported to be tracking to slide in as the week’s highest new entry at No. 4, followed by a debut for “Better Than Revenge (Taylor’s Version)” at No. 7. The “Lover” single “Cruel Summer” is on track to hold over in the U.K. at No. 8.
