The scene in Taylor Swift’s new video where she raids the bank vault of a music streaming company is coming true.
In just four days, the star has broken three major streaming records, beating the likes of Adele and Ed Sheeran.
Look What You Made Me Do was played more than eight million times on Spotify last Friday, more than any other song has achieved on its first day of release.
The video also broke YouTube’s one-day streaming record.
It received more than 39 million views in 24 hours, smashing the record set by Adele, whose video for Hello was watched 27.7 million times in its first day.
Director Joseph Kahn celebrated the achievement on Twitter, telling Swift’s fans “you are all amazing”.
Swift also set a new benchmark with the song’s lyric video, which attracted 19m views on its first day – more than double the previous record-holder, Something Just Like This by The Chainsmokers and Coldplay.
The figures defy the polarising reviews for Swift’s comeback single, a melodramatic pot-boiler which sees the pop queen turn on her critics declaring, “maybe I got mine, but you’ll all get yours”.
Spin magazine called the track “hard” and “cheerless”, while the New York Times described the lyrics as “powerful, yet joyless”.
Rolling Stone was more positive, praising Swift and playing the villain and “owning her bad press instead of merely brushing it off”.
The lyrics contain a barely veiled reference to Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, who tussled with Swift when she objected to the line “I made that bitch famous” in one of West’s songs.
The video casts its net wider, referencing everything from Swift’s relationship with Tom Hiddleston to her recent victory in a sexual assault case.
Missing the (admittedly heavy-handed) humour, Variety magazine described the video as “so narcissistic and self-referential that one could spend 5,000 words unspooling it”.
Fans were more forgiving, cheering Swift as she turned the tables on her detractors.
“Iconic. Perfect. You destroyed the haters,” wrote Natalia Kozanecka, while Alex Goldschmidt said “congratulations in advance” for winning all of next year’s MTV Awards.
One caveat to Swift’s streaming success is that, on Spotify at least, interest in her comeback single dropped over the weekend.
According to publicly-available data, Look What You Made Me Do was streamed 5.43 million times on Saturday – a drop of 2.48 million.
By contrast, Ed Sheeran’s Shape of You (which previously held the one-day streaming record) saw its streaming tally increase in its second 24 hours on the platform.
Shape of You still holds the Spotify record for the most streams in one day, racking up 10.12 million streams on 3 March, the day Sheeran’s album was released.
Look What You Made Me Do precedes Swift’s new album, Reputation, which is released in November.
