The Life of a Showgirl is well in the running for the most controversial album of the year. However, it’s not for the usual reasons. Taylor Swift’s recent album has pushed her net worth to $2.1 billion, Bloomburg estimates, and fans aren’t happy.
As with many internet fandoms, slight bickering over which artist is better is commonplace, with Swift fans owning a reputation for defending the singer to the ends of the earth.
Interestingly, since The Life of a Showgirl dropped, even the Swifties are struggling to defend the sheer volume of content that listeners must buy.
What Swift is doing has been described as “microtransactions” which were once optional for those who wanted a deeper insight to the music yet are now mandatory if you want to understand the songs in even the most basic capacity.
The controversy dates back to before the album was even released. Swift had several vinyl “variants” (different colours of the same vinyl, usually with different covers and inserts), CDs, and even movie tickets for sale. An abundance of variant merch is nothing new for the pop star, in fact, it’s become increasingly popular within the music industry over the years.
Stars such as Charli XCX, Billie Eilish, and Sabrina Carpenter have all released several vinyl variants for their latest albums. Brat had 20 variants, while HIT ME HARD AND SOFT and Man’s Best Friend both had nine. Currently, The Life of a Showgirl has eight different vinyl editions for fans to collect. Although, the optional collecting isn’t what fans take issue with.
Swift recently sold four different CDs of her latest album in a limited-edition release. Each one had acoustic renditions of songs from Showgirl on them, which encouraged Swifties to purchase all four versions. These songs will not be officially released on streaming platforms, so if audiences wanted to listen to the exclusive tracks, they were forced to pay £7.99 per CD. The release marks 18 CD variations of Showgirl. The new variants followed an earlier signed CD drop (another controversial merch drop by Swift, due to stocking issues and the four CDs per customer rule which allowed scalpers to resell CDs for upwards of £60).
The Official Release Party of a Showgirl cinema event was another point of discourse. In the movie, Swift shows what went into making “The Fate of Ophelia” music video, has a chat about the meanings behind each song, and plays through the full album with lyric videos on screen. The music video was then available to watch on YouTube, for free. So, fans were rather peeved at spending their money unnecessarily, but their contributions earned the star $46 million globally.
The album sold 3,479,500 pure copies (physical sales) within the first week of release, beating the previous record set by Adele’s 25. Swift smashed several records, including a single day streaming record on Spotify.
Swift has potentially gotten herself into hot water with other artists. Almost as soon as The Life of a Showgirl was released, listeneners deemed most of the tracks to be sampled from other pop hits. Wood has been linked to the Jackson 5’s I Want You Back, The Life of a Showgirl sounds similar to “Cool” by the Jonas Brothers, and “Opalite” pairs along with Post Malone’s “Circles”.
The star only credited George Michael in this album for “Father Figure”, which was inspired by the late singer’s song of the same name. Listeners presume it’s only a matter of time before she runs into legal issues.
None of this seems to phase the artist. In a recent video, Swift states that she isn’t the “art police” and people are allowed to have their own views of the album.
“I know what I made, I know I adore it,” Swift said.
Featured Image Credit: Taylor Swift
Fourth year student journalist studying Bachelor of Arts with Honours in Journalism Studies.
Words at Brig, The Daily Evergreen, Alloa Advertiser, Discovery Music Scotland, and The Mourning Paper.
