CELEBRITY
Taylor Swift made history this Monday by becoming the first artist to simultaneously occupy the top ten places on the list of most listened to songs in the United States, after the release of her album ‘Midnights’…
Taylor Swift scored a 10 out of 10 to become the first artist in history to claim the Top 10 slots on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the US, with tracks from her latest album, Midnights.
Billboard reported on Monday that Swift has surpassed Drake, who had held the previous record with nine of the Top 10 songs for a week in September 2021.
“10 out of 10 of the Hot 100??? On my 10th album??? I AM IN SHAMBLES,” the 32-year-old pop star tweeted.
The new album came out on 21 October with both a 13-track standard release and a deluxe version with seven bonus tracks. It has had one of the biggest album launches in nearly seven years. Billboard also reported that Swift now ties with Barbra Streisand for the female artist with the most No 1 albums.
The No 1 spot on the Billboard chart belongs to Anti-Hero, whose lyrics “It’s me/hi/I’m the problem/It’s me” have quickly become a TikTok trend. The other Top 10 songs include Lavender Haze, Maroon, Snow on the Beach, Midnight Rain, Bejeweled and Question … ?
Swift has set a number of new records with Midnights: it had the biggest first week of sales of any album this year, almost doubling the numbers of the previous title-holder, Harry’s House, the third solo album by Harry Styles. Midnights also had the highest first-week streams of the year: 72.5m, again beating Styles’ figures of 53.9m.
On the day of its release, Midnights broke global Spotify records for the most streams of a single album in one day.
Swift has also overtaken Madonna to set a new all-time UK chart record for the fastest succession of nine UK No 1 albums of any female artist – although Madonna still has the record for the most UK No 1 albums of any solo female artist, with 12 overall. Swift is now second in that list, pushing Kylie Minogue into third place.
But despite her success in the UK she won’t be able to replicate her domination of the Billboard Hot 100: after 16 of the 17 songs on Ed Sheeran’s 2017 album, ÷, charted in the Top 20, rules were introduced that mean that only the three most popular songs of any album are now eligible for the UK’s singles chart.