It’s already been a week since Taylor Swift gifted us with her eleventh studio album “The Tortured Poets Department” and fans enjoyed it everyday. Everyone instantly fell in love with all the tracks, especially with “Fortnight” featuring Post Malone. The song has spent every day at the top of the Daily Global Spotify Chart, surpassing 10 million streams each day. The album has already crossed the 1 billion streams mark on Spotify, becoming the fastest album in history to achieve the milestone. Additionally, “The Tortured Poets Department” debuted atop the UK Albums chart, securing the biggest opening week of 2020s (270,000 units) as well as the fastest-selling album of 2024. The LP is now aiming for a No. 1 debut on the Billboard 200 with an impressive and record-breaking 2.6 million copies sold in its first week in the United States. So, a question arises: how much Taylor Swift earned in this history-making week?
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“The Tortured Poets Department” had an historic first week. The album became the most streamed in a single week on Spotify, amassing 1,173,127,225 streams, a record previously held by Taylor herself with “Midnights” (785M). The album features a total of 31 tracks, which means that each track gathered an average of more than 37 million streams. There are different factors to determine the total payout, but Spotify pays artists an average of $0.004 per stream. So, multiplying it to the total amount of streams, we can estimate that “The Tortured Poets Department” earned approximately $4,692,508 only from Spotify. It’s worth noting that not the entire sum goes into Taylor’s pockets. The album has been released through Republic Records and record labels usually take between 50 and 90 percent of an artist’s earnings. Additionally, the record was co-produced by Jack Antonoff, Aaron Dessner and Patrik Berger. The first two also contributed to the writing of several songs. Thus, supposing that Taylor Swift takes a percentage of about 15-20%, we can estimate that the pop superstar pockets a sum between $703,000 and $938,000.
Beyond the earnings from Spotify, there are the physical sales. Here it’s a little bit difficult to make an estimation of the revenue as it depends on the type of format (vinyl, CD, cassette, digital download). As reported by Hits Daily Double, “The Tortured Poets Department” will debut atop the Billboard 200 with 2.6 million units sold, of which 1,915,964 are pure/albums sales. On Taylor’s official web-store, “The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology” (digital album) comes at $14.99, while the standard edition comes at $11.99. Furthermore, the vinyl edition, which includes a bonus track titled “The Manuscript,” comes at $34.99, while the CD at $12.99. Excluding prices from other retailers and making an average of the prices listed above, we will multiply the albums sales estimated by Hits Daily Double to $18.74. Therefore, $18.74 x 1,915,964 = $35,905,165. Again, supposing that Taylor pockets a percentage of about 15-20%, she would have earned between $5,385,774 and $7,181,033 from albums sales in the United States.
Ultimately, adding the figure earned from Spotify to US albums sales, Taylor Swift may have earned between $6,088,774 and $8,119,033 in just one week of “The Tortured Poets Department.”
Note: The figures provided in this article are estimates and not official numbers.
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