A Follow up on Midnights
Elie Sarver | esarver25@dtechhs.org
Art By Cynthia Shi | cshi23@dtechhs.org
On October 21, 2022, ‘Midnights’, the 10th studio album from Taylor Swift, was finally released to the world, and within the first 24 hours, started breaking records left and right.
During the first day of the release of ‘Midnights’, Taylor Swift reached over 288 million Spotify streams from her new album, breaking a record of most streams in the first day of an album release. As well as breaking the most album streams in the first day, Swift also broke the record of being the most streamed artist since album release.
Not only did ‘Midnights’ break Spotify records, it also broke Apple Music records. Taylor Swift broke the all-time record for the biggest album ever released globally on Apple Music. Swift also now has the record on Apple Music for the biggest pop album of all time by first-day streams.
As the first week of release came to an end, ‘Midnights’ stole the spot for the largest sales week for a vinyl album (since Luminate began tracking such sales in 1991) with over 575,000 sales, surpassing Harry Styles’s ‘Harry’s House’ at 182,000 vinyl sales. As well as record breaking vinyl sales, ‘Midnights’ has the biggest streaming week of the year with 857 Million official streams, and taken the spot of 3rd largest streaming week for an album as well as the largest streaming week ever for an album by a female artist.
Not only did Taylor Swift break streaming and sales records, she also broke billboard records becoming the first female to hold all top 10 spots on the top 100’s billboard. Swift became the first female to hold all 10 top spots, and she became the first ever to hold the top 10 spots, beating Drake who previously held the title with 9 songs at one time.
Keeping on the topic of breaking things, Taylor Swift also broke Ticketmaster. Taylor Swift announced an Era's tour to be happening in 2023, and getting tickets wasn’t exactly the easiest thing to do. When getting tickets for the Eras Tour, there was a presale. To get into the presale, one has to be picked randomly. Ticketmaster said that approximately 1.5 million people were sent out a presale code, but once the presale came out, over 14 million people attempted to get tickets. For the stadium closest to us d.tech students, the presale was originally at 10 am, but due to “historically unprecedented demand” our presale got moved 5 hours later. Once the presale was finally opened, the queue had over 2000 people, and Ticketmaster kept crashing, meaning that the people who were almost at the top of the queue kept on getting pushed to the back over and over again. Some fans waited multiple hours for even the smallest chance at securing tickets. Not only did Ticketmaster make it extremely hard to achieve tickets during the presale, Ticketmaster also closed the General Sale, leaving the people who didn't get a presale code to forage the resellers who sell tickets for extremely inflated prices. Only about 2% of fans were able to receive tickets, which means that one has a better chance of getting into Harvard, than getting to see Taylor Swift in concert. Those who managed to achieve tickets to the Eras Tour should consider themselves lucky.
At tea time, everybody agrees that Taylor Swift will go down in music history