Taylor Swift’s upcoming Lover album has broken the record for most ‘pre-added albums’ by a female artist on Apple Music.
Pre-adds are Apple’s unique lingo for pre-orders of a streaming music album.
Swift’s album achieved 178,600 pre-adds worldwide in the first day of availability, starting June 13th. The album breaks the previous record held by Ariana Grande’s Thank U, Next.
Since pre-adds opened on the platform, Lover’s number of pre-adds continues to grow. It is up to 222,400 at the time of writing and is increasing exponentially.
Lover will release globally on August 23rd, so there’s plenty of time to push that number above 500k or even one million.
Back to the definition: a single ‘pre-add’ occurs when an Apple Music subscriber registers their interest in a full album ahead of release. This happens when a user schedules the album’s arrival on their account.
Billie Eilish racked up over 800,000 pre-adds in one week ahead of her debut album, When We All Fall Asleep Where Do We Go? That release broke the all-time pre-add record for Apple Music at the time.
Will Taylor Swift manage to shatter Eilish’s record? She’s got nearly two months to do so.
Apple says it still emphasizes the value of albums as a storytelling tool for artists to create context around their music.
“Pre-adds are great early indicators of engagement around an artist and the intention of the fans. To actively pre-add an album, much like the pre-order we invented with iTunes, means that the fan is excited about the content and wants to be among the first to enjoy it the moment its available. That kind of engagement is very valuable to an artist and to us.”
Last week Taylor Swift dropped her new single, “You Need To Calm Down” to celebrate Pride Month. Swift gave a shout-out to LGBT-friendly organization GLAAD, which caused a spike in donations for the organization.
Taylor Swift is setting new way back to pre-release by having the date of release so far out. But can indies like king Stevian with Trap Tithe II do that in December . The indies rule in market share but with big acts like Taylor and Drake they eat away their market share. Power in numbers.