Taylor Swift‘s ‘Look What You Made Me Do‘, a super salty Kanye West diss track assisted by an incongruous-yet-entertaining Right Said Fred beat, arrived on Friday this week, and subsequently melted the internet.
There have been many, many, many takes on the song since then, some of them pretty brutal, with The New York Times labelling it “Disney-villain karaoke” and Pitchfork castigating her for dragging a “mostly-forgotten beef” back into the light.
Whatever your feelings on the song and Taylor’s position in the cultural landscape at this point, it seems her commercial lustre hasn’t yet dulled, with sales figures suggesting that the public at large is still picking up what Swift is putting down.
On YouTube, the lyric video racked up 19 million views in its first 24 hours, breaking the record for the most views of a lyric video in that amount of time – the previous record was held by Coldplay and The Chainsmokers, so make of that honour what you will.
The lyric video is currently sitting on just over 30 million, and Swift is sure to have even more sets of eyeballs on her when the finished clip launches on Monday Australian time.
Streaming figures are not yet in, and are not expected until early in the week, but ‘Look What You Made Me Do’ had racked up a total of 184,589 download sales as of late Saturday in the US.
Industry reporting site BuzzAngle currently has it on track to top 550,000 in downloads in its first week – that’s more than the 544,000 that her previous single ‘Shake It Off‘ shifted in the same time period, but less than ‘We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together‘, which topped 623,000.
The song was played approximately 2000 times on US radio on Friday, although the country music stations that used to be Swift’s bread and butter were not interested – industry data indicates that it got seven plays on six broadcasters, which is … yeah, pretty bleak, but not unexpected.
Sue Wilson, programming director at a country music station in Ohio, told BuzzAngle that she chose to play the song purely to sate the curiosity of the audience.
“I didn’t want our listeners to have to go elsewhere to hear it, so we’re using it as our big trending topic,” she explained.
“Our morning show got just a couple of calls, and they weren’t positive,” she continued. “One said, ‘Don’t play it again, it’s not country.’”
Speaking of mostly-forgotten beefs, Taylor Swift is set debut the official video for the song at the Katy Perry-hosted MTV Video Music Awards on Sunday night, US time, so expect some level of manufactured drama to arise out of that.
Swift’s album Reputation is set for release on November 10.
