Taylor Swift had a phenomenal 2023, breaking records left, right and center, and it looks like she’s going to do it again this year.
Her song “Cruel Summer,” from the 2019 album Lover, has become Swift’s first to get more than 2 billion streams on Spotify.
According to the fan account Spotify Swiftie on X, formerly Twitter, “Cruel Summer” is also the 17th most streamed song in Spotify’s history.
One fan account, Haunted Swiftie – TS Spotify, even went to the length of calculating when other Swift songs would surpass 2 billion plays on Spotify.
It worked out that “Blank Space” from the album 1989 would hit the milestone on December 12 this year, while “Anti-Hero” from Midnights would get there on April 5, 2025.
Swift holds a range of records on the streaming music service, including becoming the first person to have five albums each with over 7 billion streams on Spotify.
In March, she became the first woman to have 10 solo singles get more than 1 billion streams on Spotify and she is currently the second-most listened-to artist in the world, behind The Weeknd, with around 104 million streams a month.
Swift’s success with music sales, combined with her record-breaking The Eras Tour, helped the singer land on Forbes’ billionaires list for the first time.
The business media outlet wrote that the 14-time Grammy winner reached billionaire status in October, due partly to an “estimated $190 million post-tax earnings from her historic Eras Tour.” It also wrote that Swift was the “the first person to [become a billionaire] based solely on songwriting and performing.”
The Eras Tour started in March 2023 and is a three-and-half-hour show covering some of the biggest hits of her career, performed over 10 acts and representing the different phases of her life.
It became the highest grossing live music concert tour of all time before reaching the halfway point of its 152 tour dates.
Swift’s bank account was also helped by a record-smashing concert movie film of the Eras tour, which became the highest-grossing domestic concert film of all time. It managed to achieve that on its opening weekend by earning $92 million in just those few days.
It also made $26 million on the first day of advanced ticket sales, smashing the previous record held by Avengers: Endgame at $16 million.
Swift was credited alongside her contemporary, Beyoncé, who also released a concert movie in 2023, for helping to revive the financial fortunes of fledgling cinema chain AMC.
AMC Theatres CEO Adam Aron credited Swift and Beyoncé with “literally” saving the theater chain’s financial fortunes. The two women exclusively screened their concert films at AMC in late 2023. Beyoncé’s highlighted her Renaissance world tour.
“Despite a diminished box office overall, in the fourth quarter compared to the same quarter a year ago, AMC’s revenue grew by 11.5 percent and AMC’s adjusted EBITDA almost tripled. Literally, all of that increase… is attributable to our having shown these two movies in our theaters in the U.S. and internationally,” Aron said, during AMC Entertainment’s quarterly earnings call in February.
