Like many era-defining pop stars, Taylor Swift makes history everywhere she goes and with just about everything she does. Take, for example, her first visit to boyfriend Travis Kelce‘s New Heights podcast on Wednesday night (Aug. 13). While the weekly show the Kansas City tight end co-hosts with his retired NFL sibling Jason Kelce regularly gets anywhere from 12,000 to nearly 300,000 views on YouTube for their genial sports talk, the figures for Swift’s pop-in are already, predictably, off the charts.
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As of 1:45 p.m. on Thursday (Aug. 14) — just 17 hours after its debut — the two-hour Swift episode had more than 10.8 million views, easily besting the second-most popular episode of the show to date, an eight-million-view 2024 chat with Jason’s wife, Kylie Kelce, as well as nearly doubling the views for a 2023 chat with Travis’ Super Bowl-winning teammate, QB Patrick Mahomes.
The figures on Spotify are equally gaudy, with the streamer reporting on Thursday that Swift’s New Heights appearance has already become one of the top-performing podcast episodes of the past 12 months. According to Spotify, based on an average of the previous five episodes, the Swift chat brought a 3,000% increase in new listeners to the show, as well as spiking an overall 2,500% increase in average streams of the episode and a 1,100% jump in tune in around 8:45 p.m. ET, which was less than two minutes into the show.
Not surprisingly, Swift also helped increase female listenership to New Heights, with Spotify saying that the number of females tuning in already tracking 618% higher than the average for the previous five shows on its first day of release. That figure becomes even wilder when you consider that female listeners already made up the majority (58%) of New Heights listeners.
The already popular podcast that has nearly three million subscribers on YouTube got a major boost when Swift visited to reveal the details of her upcoming 12th album, which is due out on Oct. 3 and features a collab with former Eras Tour opening act Sabrina Carpenter on the title track. The LP, produced by Max Martin and Shellback, the dynamic studio duo behind some of her biggest hits from albums such as 1989 and Reputation.
Swift, who rarely does sit-down interviews, once again proved to be the ultimate master of her album roll-out narrative on New Heights, which racked up nearly nine million views within its first 12 hours on YouTube, with the New York Times reporting that 1.3 million people tuned in simultaneously to a livestream of the episode before the crowd crush caused a brief technical glitch.
In a comparison likely to further stoke the ire of Donald Trump — who earlier this month said he “CAN’T STAND” Swift after earlier saying he “HATES” the singer — the Times noted that, by comparison, an October episode of the very popular Joe Rogan Experience pod featuring then-candidate Trump hit around 11 million views in its first 12 hours on YouTube. CNN added that the 1.3 million Swift figure nearly doubled the 800,000 people who watched Trump’s Rogan appearance in the first hour of that October show.
Even the Kelce’s were not immune to the number numbness, with the show’s X account shouting out the fans for helping them “break the internet” amid the technical glitches, Travis posting a happy dance video when it came back online and Jason adding that the 1.3 million figure is just “the epitome of numerology” given Swift’s career-long obsession with the number 13.
At press time the nearly three-hour Rogan chat with Elon Musk in 2018 is among the most-viewed ever on YouTube with more than 69 million views, though CNN host Kate Bouldan predicted that the Swift/Heights ep is already on its way to becoming “one of the most-watched podcasts of all time.”
In case you missed out, check out the Swift episode below.