XXXTentacion Breaks Taylor Swift’s Single-Day Streaming Record On Spotify
On Tuesday, the day after XXXTentacion was fatally shot at the age of 20, the singer-songwriter’s “SAD!” broke the single-day record for Spotify streams that had been held by Taylor Swift, a source tells Billboard.
“SAD!” amassed 10.4 million streams on Spotify June 19, according to Spotifycharts.com; Swift’s “Look What You Made Me Do” racked up 10.1 million streams on the service the day it was released, August 25, 2017.
Helping XXXTentacion’s single break Swift’s record were about 15 million new paying subscribers: Spotify counts more than 75 million subscribers now, up from about 60 million at the end of July 2017. Spotify’s free user base has ballooned as well.
Spotify had removed “SAD!” from its top playlists including Rap Caviar in May after announcing a new “hateful conduct” policy, as XXXTentacion had been charged — but not convicted — of several felonies, including domestic violence and witness tampering. But Spotify restored the track on Rap Caviar weeks ago after telling the artist’s camp weeks ago that it would do so, admitting that the rollout of the policy had been flawed. The day of his death, Spotify moved “Sad!” to the top of its Rap Caviar playlist, and included a tribute to the artist on the service as well.
This story originally appeared on Billboard.