Taylor Swift Breaks Drake’s All-Time Streaming Record In America

Taylor Swift and Drake are the two biggest musicians in the world, and they regularly beat one another for spots in the history books. Whenever one of them drops a new single or album, there’s a good chance they’ll pull ahead of the other in one way or another. Thanks to her new album, Swift has beaten another one of Drake’s records–and it’s one of his most impressive.

Billboard reports that Swift’s new album The Tortured Poets Department has officially broken the record for the most streams earned in a single week in American history. Impressively, the title only needed six days to not just best, but shatter the previously set high point…and the final number, which is yet to be revealed, is sure to be much larger.

In its first six days of availability, The Tortured Poets Department racked up 799 million plays on platforms like Spotify and Apple Apple Music. That sum represents plays of any or all of the 31 tracks featured on the project, not spins of the title in full.

Before this week, the record for the most-streamed album in one week in U.S. history belonged to Drake’s Scorpion. That studio effort collected a little more than 745 million plays when it first arrived. That title features 25 songs, and it established this new high point in 2018–and nobody has seriously challenged it since then.

Swift didn’t narrowly pass Drake, she sped past him, and she’s not done yet. Already, The Tortured Poets Department topped Scorpion’s record by 50 million streams. By the time the title’s first full frame has eclipsed and every listen has been counted, the final number of plays on streaming sites in one week may near one billion–and that’s just in the U.S.

Spotify reported during The Tortured Poets Department’s first week that it had become the first album in the platform’s history to earn one billion plays in less than seven days. None of the tunes from the project were released before the collection was made available in full, so no early singles aided in the title reaching that milestone.

Of course, the lengthy tracklist helped The Tortured Poets Department break this record, but Swift’s popularity did most of the work. Even if the set had featured far fewer tunes, it likely would have racked up hundreds of millions of plays, and it might have even given Drake a run for his money.