Greed knows no bounds, and neither does Taylor Swift. Don’t hate me, Swifties! I know your eyes are finally opening, too. Please, allow me to give 10s where they’re due: Your fave is likely one of the biggest pop stars the world will ever see. But her business acumen might end up being more historical than her actual art.
After the release of her latest album, The Life of a Showgirl, Swift has broken records with her biggest sales week ever: 2.7 million sales in the first 24 hours alone. Are you reading what I’m writing? This feat also marks the second-largest sales week for any album since 1991, when modern chart methodology began. Only Adele’s 25 has surpassed that number, selling 3.378 million copies in its first week in 2015. And again, Swift’s numbers are based on one single day of sales.
To call Taylor Swift an industry titan would be an understatement. She is the behemoth who stands above all. She makes history with her tours, her theater experiences, her merchandise, and chiefly, her ability to convince the same fans to buy the same album over and over again. A proclaimed self-made billionaire, Swift has made it to the top of her mountain of money by relating deeply to her fans, then convincing them to crack those pretty little wallets open. With Showgirl, Swift has done this multiple times over.
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“File this under ‘save your best for the finale,’” Swift wrote on an Instagram post on October 4th, promoting multiple CD variants of her latest album that separately feature acoustic tracks not found on the standard version of Showgirl. “I think my favorite moments from the tour were the acoustic surprises. So I went back into the studio with Max and Shellback to record acoustic/unplugged versions of a few of the Showgirl songs with brand new vocals and production! Cannot WAIT for you to hear.”
On October 6th, Swift would post something similar while hawking an additional deluxe version of the album, this time available only on iTunes for 24 hours! In addition to iterations found online, that makes for at least 11 different CD variants, and nine different vinyl editions released of the album. One exhaustively curated spreadsheet puts the total count at 28. These captions read like a gift to fans, but let’s call them what they actually are: sales pitches. You cannot WAIT for people to spend that bread, girl!
Taylor Swift has arguably the most loyal contemporary fanbase, the Swifties, which is the closest thing to a rival of Michael Jackson’s collective of stans, in terms of scale and fervor. Her appeal has always been emotional transparency. For years upon years, Swift has been able to depend on her ability to turn heartbreak into parasocial intimacy into empire. But it seems even Swifties get tired, as evinced by the comments on the official Taylor Nation Instagram fan page.
“This is so upsetting,” one stan wrote on a post pushing the limited CD variants. “I love Taylor, I do. But for the love of God why do you need so many variants? Why does one hard working fan have to buy seven different versions of an album instead of just having all of the songs be on one complete album? You have millions of dollars. Give us broke fans a break.”
A personalized, world-spanning battalion of money spenders is hard not to mobilize. Taylor Swift is aiming to break every record imaginable, and it starts with getting her product into the hands of the masses. In the Swift economy, fans are more than mere listeners — they’re shareholders, and Taylor rewards them accordingly. Not with the authentic intimacy that Swifties are constantly seeking, but with artificial access. You can own a piece of her empire, as long as you’re willing to pay for it.