Queen of Charts: Taylor Swift’s Tortured Poets Breaking Records in the Streaming Era

Taylor Swift’s latest album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” came out on April 19, 2024. Per usual, she’s breaking records—and we couldn’t let a major Taylor moment pass without a little analysis from us. 

Looking at the data, this album is rocketing Swift even higher—at least when it comes to the Billboard charts. Let’s take a look. 

Interestingly (or maybe not surprisingly), this is probably related to streaming and releasing all songs at once. We kept digging into Swift’s record results, deciding to look at how new Swift releases performed as they entered the charts in prior years.  

That’s the difference between streaming and old-fashioned record and CD sales—instead of instant hits, songs of the past took time to climb the charts. Artists of today release an album’s songs all at once and, in turn, get quick feedback from fans. Within hours, someone like Swift can see which songs have struck a chord (or a nerve) with listeners, which ones are getting less attention, and which deep cuts could become sleeper hits. 

For a little fun, we decided to use Domo’s new App Studio for this final embed. It is almost like building your own app or website—not just a dashboard. We used App Studio’s customizable themes to set the mood, pulling the purple from Taylor’s dress on “Speak Now’s” album cover. We also have a second page with the data explorer we used in the blog post way back in 2022 (when App Studio was just an idea in some engineer’s head). 

We can see a similar trend by filtering for Madonna, the original queen of musical reinvention. Most of her songs took a few weeks to get traction on the charts.  

So, where will the music industry go from here? What will the next phase of sharing music be? We can’t tell just yet—but we’d be willing to bet Taylor will remain front and center. 

We created a custom app using App Studio that’s all about Taylor and her music, below. Check it out, and visit our App Studio page to learn how this works.