Taylor Swiftly breaks four YouTube and Spotify records

The scene in Taylor Swift's new video where she raids the bank vault of a music streaming company is coming true.

In just four days, the star has broken four major streaming records, beating the likes of Adele and Ed Sheeran.

Look What You Made Me Do was played a total of 10,129,087 times on Spotify last Friday, the day of its release, more than any other song has achieved in a single day.

The video also broke YouTube's one-day streaming record.

It received more than 39 million views in 24 hours, smashing the record set by Adele, whose video for Hello was watched 27.7 million times in its first day.

Director Joseph Kahn celebrated the achievement on Twitter, telling Swift's fans "you are all amazing".

Swift also set a new benchmark with the song's lyric video, which attracted 19m views on its first day - more than double the previous record-holder, Something Just Like This by The Chainsmokers and Coldplay.

And in achieving the most Spotify streams in a day, Look What You Made Me Do also beat the record for first-day streams.

The figures defy the polarising reviews for Swift's comeback single, a melodramatic pot-boiler which sees the pop queen turn on her critics declaring, "maybe I got mine, but you'll all get yours".

Spin magazine called the track "hard" and "cheerless", while the New York Times described the lyrics as "powerful, yet joyless".

Rolling Stone was more positive, praising Swift and playing the villain and "owning her bad press instead of merely brushing it off".

The lyrics contain a barely veiled reference to Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, who tussled with Swift when she objected to the line "I made that bitch famous" in one of West's songs.

The video casts its net wider, referencing everything from Swift's relationship with Tom Hiddleston to her recent victory in a sexual assault case.

Missing the (admittedly heavy-handed) humour, Variety magazine described the video as "so narcissistic and self-referential that one could spend 5,000 words unspooling it".

Fans were more forgiving, cheering Swift as she turned the tables on her detractors.

"Iconic. Perfect. You destroyed the haters," wrote Natalia Kozanecka, while Alex Goldschmidt said "congratulations in advance" for winning all of next year's MTV Awards.

One caveat to Swift's streaming success is that, on Spotify at least, interest in her comeback single dropped over the weekend.

According to publicly-available data, Look What You Made Me Do was streamed 5.43 million times on Saturday - a drop of 2.48 million.

By contrast, Ed Sheeran's Shape of You (which previously held the one-day streaming record) saw its streaming tally increase in its second 24 hours on the platform.

Look What You Made Me Do precedes Swift's new album, Reputation, which is released in November.

 

 

Photo: BIG MACHINE LABEL GROUP. Caption: Swift is seen raiding the bank vaults of streaming services in the video