Taylor Swift Is Doing Michael Jackson–Level Numbers, but Does She Have a “Billie Jean”?

Quick pop quiz: Prior to this week, what was Taylor Swift’s last new No. 1 hit on Billboard’s Hot 100?

I know, I know … it’s a little hard to keep up with her relentless output. If you are among the Americans only passively aware of Swift’s oeuvre, you might think her last No. 1 was the moody one where she says hi, she’s the problem, it’s her. But “Anti-Hero” hit No. 1 nearly 18 months ago. What about that percolating bop about the hottest days of the year? Improbably, “Cruel Summer” reached No. 1 last fall—not only late for summer, but four years after its original release as a Lover album cut. But nope, there was another new Taylor No. 1 after that.

Here’s the correct answer, in the form of a question: Does anybody remember “Is It Over Now?”

“Is It Over Now?” debuted at No. 1, fueled by the release of Swift’s latest rerecording, 1989 (Taylor’s Version), last November. When that supersized LP reboot arrived to predictably gargantuan sales, one of its bonus tracks “from the vault” benefited from the rising tide. A burbling meditation on lost love, “Over” spent just one week on top. I didn’t bother covering it for this Slate No. 1 hits series, because we’d just covered “Cruel Summer,” and “Over” seemed like a rounding error—a fluky side effect of Swift’s newest album-release gambit, not a hit anyone beyond rabid Swifties would remember by 2024.

How wrong I was! “Over” had legs. It amassed a very respectable 22 weeks on the Hot 100 from mid-November through early April, about half of those weeks in the Top 20. It became a radio smash months after its arrival, peaking in March at No. 3 in all-genre airplay and No. 1 at pure pop stations, the first “Taylor’s Version” track to top radio playlists. (And it’s not like DJs were hurting for Taylor material all those months: “Cruel Summer” is still one of radio’s 10 most played singles.) Though I remain a bit skeptical that “Is It Over Now?” will ever rank highly among the pantheon of Taylor Swift’s greatest hits, it has to be regarded as a legitimate hit, not a barnacle clinging to the hull of Taylor’s pop dominance.

I bring up “Is It Over Now?” to offer a benchmark for assessing the latest flotsam to wash up with a Swift tidal wave: “Fortnight,” a song that happens to be Track 1 on Swift’s new megablockbuster album The Tortured Poets Department, happens to be a duet with Post Malone, happens to be the new track with a music video, and now happens to be No. 1 on the Hot 100.

In short, you don’t need me to tell you why this song is No. 1. It’s obvious. What none of us can answer is whether “Fortnight” will be remembered as a classic Taylor hit or a side effect of Swift’s biggest album launch ever, the moment when she beat her own record by sweeping the Top 14 slots on the Hot 100. Other first singles from prior Swift LPs, like “Look What You Made Me Do,” “Cardigan,” and “Willow” made big Hot 100 splashes but fell off quickly and never became lasting radio hits. Will “Fortnight” go down as an “Anti-Hero,” an “Is It Over Now?,” or a “Look What You Made Me Do”? Could it maybe even be Taylor Swift’s “Billie Jean”?

OK, that last hypothetical is a laugh—“Fortnight” is no “Billie”-style banger—but hold that thought, because someone was just asking recently whether Swift has generated any songs worthy of that Michael Jackson–level cultural footprint. At least in terms of raw numbers, Swift is certainly putting Jacko-level points on the board.

The final tally: In its first week, The Tortured Poets Department shifted a whopping 2.6 million album units, making it her biggest-opening album ever. Depending on how you count, that’s either the second or third biggest opening week in modern Billboard history (after 1991, when the charts became far more accurate). It’s about 800,000 shy of Adele’s 25 opener of 3.4 million in 2015, and just a couple hundred thou higher than the 2.4 million copies of No Strings Attached that ’N Sync sold in 2000. Of course, comparing 2024 numbers to 2000 numbers is apples and oranges—that ’N Sync number was straight CD sales. Nowadays, in Billboard parlance, “album units” include traditional full-album sales plus aggregated streams and downloads of individual tracks—and Tortured Poets was certainly helped by the fact that it’s Swift’s longest album ever at 31 tracks, including its second disc The Anthology. Nonetheless, even limiting Swift’s tally to traditional commerce, her numbers are stunning: Tortured Poets sold 1.91 million copies the old-fashioned way (including an astonishing 859,000 vinyl LPs). That gives her the third biggest pure-sales week ever, behind Adele and ’N Sync. Among Swift’s own sales, Tortured Poets outsold her previous career high, last year’s 1989 (Taylor’s Version), by more than half a million copies.

The streaming numbers were similarly gargantuan. Altogether, Tortured Poets’ 31 tracks racked up 891 million streams—the largest streaming week for an album ever, beating the 25 tracks from Drake’s 2018 album Scorpion by nearly 150 million. Again, album length helped—as country megastar Morgan Wallen showed us by making his last two LPs over 30 songs, more tracks means more streams for the charts. But Swift’s streams per song number was also exceptionally high: “Fortnight” generated 76.2 million streams by itself, edging out Olivia Rodrigo’s big opening week for “Drivers License” three years ago. (The alleged Tay-versus-Liv rivalry persists!) And finally—have I buried the lede?—on the Hot 100, not only does Swift lock down Nos. 1–14, beating her own 2022 record when 10 songs from Midnights blanketed the Top 10. She also debuts all 31 Tortured Poets tracks on the big chart, from “Fortnight” at No. 1 to “Robin” at No. 55, another all-time record for most song debuts by an artist in a single week.

Are you surprised by any of this? I’m not, given the ongoing hegemony of last year’s Time Person of the Year. I’m almost underwhelmed she didn’t lock down chart positions Nos. 1–31! Swift’s second imperial phase is now so outsize and full of superlatives that it’s a bit hard for any of her feats to shock us anymore. (In 2022, when I covered the many chart feats of Midnights, I wrote about how truly gobsmacking it was for a pop hitmaker 17 years into her career to achieve new chart firsts. I’m not gobsmacked anymore.) At a certain point, this makes it hard to judge either the album or its songs as art—even pop art. Like, is “Fortnight” our nation’s No. 1 song only because it leads off Swift’s new behemoth, or is it on top because it’s an exceptional song?

One man’s opinion: Among chart-topping lead singles from Taylor Swift albums—seven of her last eight LPs (all but Lover) led off with a Hot 100 No. 1—“Fortnight” is a little better than average, which makes it a very good song. It’s not quite at the level of “Anti-Hero,” the lead single from Midnights, which boasts some of Swift’s all-time greatest hooks and has added catchphrases to our lexicon, or my sleeper fave “Willow” from Evermore, with hypnotic guitar playing by co-writer-producer Aaron Dessner and a gossamer Swift melody that’s quite literally bewitching. On the other hand, “Fortnight” is a damn sight better than “Look What You Made Me Do” from Reputation, which will remain forever encased in the Swiftian grievances of 2017, and while it’s not as funny as Red’s “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” it’s also less snarky and self-amused. I’d rank “Fortnight” somewhere between Folklore’s “Cardigan” and 1989’s “Shake It Off”—a moody bop that’s almost as moody as the former, not quite as boppy as the latter.