Taylor Swift is riding high on the wave of records with her out-of-nowhere quarantine album Folklore, an album that can put her the top of the Grammy Album of the year after her win for 1989. Besides critical acclaim, the country-pop singer has earned a great many accolades on the charts too. Taylor Swift Folklore features names like Grammy Award Winner Bon Iver with Justin Vernon co-writing the song ‘Exile’ and Aaron Dessner of the Grammy Winning band The National who has co-produced the album.
Swift’s new album Folklore exploded on the Billboard 200 with the most massive debut of 2020. Of the 16 songs present in the album, three were in the top 10. A trio of top 10 debuts isn’t new on Billboard, but it remains an incredible show of popularity that very few can muster.
Taylor Swift’s Folklore broke the Guinness World Records titles too. She achieved the ”most day-one streams of an album on Spotify (female)” after being streamed a whopping 80.6 million times. According to Republic Records, her album set a new 24-hour streaming record on Apple Music (35.47 million) and sold a reported 1.3 million copies worldwide in the initial 24-hours.
So what’s behind her record-breaking hits? Well, Folklore just came out of the blue. No marketing hype, probably due to the COVID19 pandemic or it could have been a marketing gimmick itself! The New York Times described it well, “Folklore, which came out on July 24 with less than 24 hours notice, opened at No. 1 on Billboard’s latest album chart with a whopping 846,000 sales in the United States. That’s the third-highest weekly total for any album in four years, beaten only by Swift’s’s last two albums’ ‘Reputation’ (1.2 million in 2017) and ‘Lover’ (867,000 a year ago).”
What comes as a surprise that the Grammy-award winning singer’s latest feat is no longer possible in the streaming era, but her canny marketing worked wonders and numbers too! When Folklore was announced, Swift’s website was fully primed to deliver her album in an array of deals for items like a $49 cardigan and a $15 phone stand. But her surprise release strategy brought its momentum. Within days of release, Folklore was a legitimate sensation online.
On the lyrics front, Swift explained she wrote from the perspective of people she never met, people she has known and those whom she wishes she had never met. In isolation, my imagination has run wild, and this album is the result, a collection of songs and stories that flowed like a stream of consciousness. Picking up a pen was my way of escaping into fantasy, history and memory. I have told these stories to the best of my ability with all the love, wonder and whimsy they deserve. Now it’s up to you to pass them down, and she posted on Instagram.
Folklore is a twist on Swift’s’s traditional country-pop style. It reflects the woodsy cover that represents the album.
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