𧔠| Two years of âfolkloreâ: how Taylor Swift's album solidified her status as a prolific songwriter, and how its release impacted the music scene, a thread
Announced as a surprise on July 23, 2020, Taylor Swift's eighth studio album, "folklore", marked the singer's first collaboration project with Aaron Dessner, a member of The National.
The partnership guided the sound of the project, which in addition to country and pop elements, has a dominance of alternative, the albumâs attributed genre.
âfolkloreâ is enriched by expanding its focus beyond Swift's personal stories, tackling imagined characters and fictional stories â a ghost, a teenage love triangle, Rebekah Harkness, an exiled man, her veteran grandfather, and healthcare workers during the pandemic.
The album's release sparked a surge in the search for the word âfolkloreâ on the internet, prompting the American Folklore Society to launch an educational campaign on folkloric studies.
In the albumâs first 24 hours, it broke the record for most played female album in its first day on Spotify (80.6 million streams).
âcardigan" soared to #1 on the Global Spotify chart with 7,742 million plays, setting the record for biggest first-day streams for a song by a female artist in 2020
âfolkloreâ debuted with 846,000 units, consisting of 615,000 pure sales and 289.85 million streams in the US
Within a week, the project had already sold over 2 million copies around the world and later became the best-selling album of 2020 in the United States.
The project also became the album with the most weeks to top the Billboard 200 in 2020 (8)
All of the albumâs 16 tracks debuted on the Billboard Hot 100, including 3 top 10 entries and 5 in the top 20; with âcardiganâ, the lead single, debuting at #1.
Swift became the first artist in Billboard history to debut atop Hot 100 and Billboard 200 in the same week.
âfolkloreâ reached #1 in 17 countries, including Australia, Ireland, and the UK.
The project has been described by critics as the record that defined 2020; Rolling Stone said that the album will âgo down in history as the definitive quarantine album.â
â Billboard crowned the album's release as one of the defining musical moments of the early 2020s.
In addition to being highly acclaimed, the album was extremely well received at award ceremonies, earning the biggest award in the music industry, the Grammy for Album of the Year.
â Swift also earned her first-ever Danish Music Award, and collected another Japan Gold Disc Award
The album served as inspiration for several artists in the music industry, such as Hayley Williams, Christina Perri, and Rina Sawayama;
The Week called it "the first great pandemic art" for setting "a high bar" for future pandemic-inspired projects.
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