Release of Taylor Swift album leads to music streaming surge
Just after midnight EDT on April 19, legions of Taylor Swift fans piled onto music streaming services to listen to the pop superstar’s new album, The Tortured Poets Department. The online release of the album, covering common Swift themes of angst and heartbreak, led to a 36% surge in traffic on Spotify according to Kentik’s OTT traffic statistics.
Ms. Swift is no stranger to the pages of the Kentik blog since her appearance in January’s post on the first-ever exclusively live-streamed NFL playoff game. This time around, the popularity of Swift’s new album was measurable using Kentik’s OTT Service Tracking combines DNS queries with NetFlow to allow a user to understand exactly how OTT services are being delivered.
Two hours after the album release, T-Swizzle fans were treated to another 15 songs when the surprise second half of the album was released. In the accompanying traffic graph, the two album releases appear as traffic spikes at 04:00 UTC (midnight EDT) and 06:00 UTC (2am EDT).
Doug Madory is the director of internet analysis for Kentik where he works on internet infrastructure analysis. The Washington Post dubbed him “The Man who can see the Internet” for his reputation in identifying significant developments in the global layout of the internet. Doug is regularly quoted by major news outlets about developments ranging from national blackouts to BGP hijacks to the activation of submarine cables. Prior to Kentik, he was the lead analyst for Oracle’s internet intelligence team (formerly Dyn Research and Renesys).
About the data
How do we get this data? Kentik uses thousands of service provider networks and cloud agents, located around the world, to collect information about network events, outages, and disruptions.
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