SPEAKER 1: This is Planet Money, from NPR.

ALEXI HOROWITZ-GHAZI: Taylor Swift's new record got all kinds of people all hot and bothered. They said it was sloppy, immature, just not that good. (SINGING) Her name was Kitty Made her money being pretty and witty They gave her the keys to this city

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SPEAKER 2: Some listeners were disappointed it didn't sound as advertised.

SPEAKER 3: This is a sad day to be a Swiftie. And that's just my truth.

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HOROWITZ-GHAZI: But it is also capitalist genius.

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SPEAKER 4: Death of a Showgirl, The Life Of A Capitalist. That's what I think this album honestly should be called.

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HOROWITZ-GHAZI: The Life of a Showgirl broke records for sales, the equivalent of over 4 million albums sold in the first week. At the same time, a lot of fans had concerns about the actual quality of the album. (SINGING) And they said she didn't do it legitly

HOROWITZ-GHAZI: If the album didn't sound so great, how did it sell so much better than everything else? The answer to that question may just be the trade secret behind Taylor Swift, Inc. (SINGING) Hey, thank you for the lovely bouquet You're sweeter than a peach But you don't know the life of a showgirl, babe And you're never, ever gonna

HOROWITZ-GHAZI: Hello, and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi. Today on the show, sure, Taylor Swift is a talented musician and performer, but we're here because of her talents at money making. Our friends over at Vox's daily news podcast, Today Explained, had a great dissection of how musicians are using new savvy to game the charts and play off the spending habits of their biggest fans. None more than Taylor Swift. So we are turning it over to Noel King at Today Explained to take us through, as she calls it, Capitalism, Taylor's Version. Also why T-Swizzle doesn't even really care if you like her album.

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TAYLOR SWIFT: Thank you for an unforgettable night. We will see you next time. Give it up for the band. And the dancers.

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NOEL KING: I'm Noel King.

ELIAS LEIGHT: My full name is Elias Leight, and I report on music for The Wall Street Journal.

KING: Are you a Taylor Swift fan?

LEIGHT: I am, a little more the early stuff, a little less of the more recent stuff.

KING: What did you think of the new record.

LEIGHT: [LAUGHS] It was not my favorite. But again, as a reporter, I try to keep that out of what we write, you know?

KING: You don't want to tell me what beef with it was?

LEIGHT: I mean, I'm more of a melody and rhythm guy than a lyric guy, but I found some of the lyrics to sort of be cringey to a level where they pulled me completely out of the experience of listening. (SINGING) Every joke's just trolling and memes Sad as it seems Apathy is hard

KING: She set a record, as I understand it, for biggest debut week. How big was it?

LEIGHT: So she cleared the 4 million threshold, which honestly, most of the industry thought could not be done. And the previous record was around 3.5 million set by Adele. (SINGING) Hello, it's me

LEIGHT: That was a decade ago. And at that time, sort of streaming was just taking off, and a lot of artists were very wary of it.

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SPEAKER 5: We need to fight, like, the Spotify thing.

SWIFT: I really believe that we in the music industry can work together to find a way to bond technology with integrity.

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LEIGHT: And when Adele dropped that album, she kept it off streaming, not just for the first week, but for something like seven months. And the only song that was available to stream was-- (SINGING) Hello

LEIGHT: That massive first single. And just the sales numbers were through the roof for that. More recently, now artists are very comfortable, most of them, with streaming, especially the stars. They want to have their album in every possible place that a fan might want to listen to it.

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MILEY CYRUS: I pre-saved my album on Spotify.

[CHEERING]

CYRUS: Did you?

SABRINA CARPENTER: Hey, it's Sabrina, you can pre-save my new album, Short N' Sweet on Spotify now.

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LEIGHT: But sort of a new technique has become popular for the first week, which is release a lot of different variations of the album. And that both gives your biggest fans a lot of different ways to support you, and also allows you to boost your first week sales numbers.

KING: OK, so Taylor has released a bunch of albums since Adele released 25. This was the first one that beat the record. And what you're saying is it beat the record because there were so many different variants you could buy.

LEIGHT: That's a great question. I mean, we don't have a counterfactual, but it certainly helped. I mean, she just did a absolutely massive amount of physical sales.

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SPEAKER 6: Breaking news. Taylor Swift is back, and she's breaking records. Now, when I say records, 1.2 million copies of vinyl alone in the first 24 hours.

SPEAKER 7: I think it's genius. If they're buying it, why not keep giving it to them?

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LEIGHT: Boy, so I think there were 27 different physical editions. There were a couple of those CDs came in kind of box sets, which had clothing.

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SPEAKER 8: My Life of a Showgirl cardigan just came in.

SPEAKER 9: Cardigan arrived. In pretty box. I mean, I don't even own a CD player, but I have a CD now.

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LEIGHT: Some of the vinyl came with different jewelry items. There was a bracelet people liked, a necklace.

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SPEAKER 10: That is why I bought one, two, and three.

SPEAKER 11: I got the hairbrush and the barrette. So let's open it up.

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LEIGHT: Some of the CDs came with bonus acoustic tracks. There were also the digital download versions that came with bonus acoustic tracks. (SINGING) Don't know the life of a showgirl, babe And you're never, ever gonna

[LAUGHS]

LEIGHT: Some of them had voice memos from Taylor about songs that she'd done instead of the acoustic.

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SWIFT: "Opalite" is a song on my album that I think is just so infectiously, contagiously happy.

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LEIGHT: So there was a really wide range of options for the super Taylor fan.

KING: I'm not going to say it's cheating, because all's fair in love and capitalism, but album variants are very clearly a strategy to boost sales numbers. Why?

LEIGHT: Yeah, I mean, so I think one thing people sometimes don't understand, I mean, artists never want to admit it, but a lot of artists and also their labels are fiercely competitive, and they really care a lot about the commercial reception of their work. They want to say they got a top 10, a top 5, ideally a number one. The problem with streaming is for the listener, it's like this amazing offering where you're paying $11 a month for almost all the music in history. But for artists, a lot of their biggest fans actually will spend more money on their behalf. They want to support them. And certainly, there's other ways you can tap into that, by merchandise, by selling concert tickets. But one way they've increasingly tried to do it is by releasing a lot of kind of variations of this album and making them more like collectibles. A lot of people who buy the vinyl don't even listen to it. They just put it up on the wall.

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SPEAKER 12: So I bought every single vinyl and CD variant for Taylor Swift's The Life of a Showgirl so you don't have to.

SPEAKER 13: It's so pretty. Side A. Oh my God, look at the rippling.

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LEIGHT: And then at the same time, again, if you can get one fan to buy three, five, seven copies, that is just going to boost your numbers. And most artists, again, especially at this level, they're competing with their peers, and they want to win. So they want to push every lever that is available for them to get a big first week.

KING: Taylor Swift does go the extra mile. It's what people like or at least recognize about her. This thing about I'm going to do 38 variants to boost my sales, she's not the only person doing it, I imagine. Who else?

LEIGHT: No, yeah. I mean, again, this has become a super popular tactic. So the 10 biggest albums last year, ranked by physical sales, came in 22 different versions on average. Where you've really seen it come into play is when artists are in tight races for number one. And last year, there was a race that turned a lot of heads. (SINGING) Oh, I leave quite an impression (RAPPING) After three number one albums Would have thought I'd feel amazing

LEIGHT: It was Sabrina Carpenter versus Travis Scott. And it was very close. And as it got near the end of the week, they were both, I mean, Travis put out, I think, six different digital variants on the final day of the week, and Sabrina put out three of her own.

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SPEAKER 14: This is a chess move. Sabrina is pretty much like, I want y'all to stream the hell out of this album, and this song. Boost my numbers up for the day so I can eclipse Travis Scott.

SPEAKER 15: Honestly, she didn't come to play. She took courses from Miss Taylor Swift on how to secure that number one album. I'm sorry.

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LEIGHT: And it's just the digital variants are sort of the easiest one to put together. It's like, oh look, here's my album plus a voice note or an acoustic song. Or sometimes people honestly don't even add music. They just put out different artwork. So you can just throw them out very quickly and say, hey fans, this is only available for six hours. Go get it. Again, in that case, because the race was so close, Sabrina Carpenter ended up winning by only about 1,000 units.

KING: This is a really interesting way to kind of game the music business, which of course is a business, is as these artists know. Is there anyone lobbing critiques at this strategy?

LEIGHT: Yeah, I mean, definitely. As the strategy has become more popular, the backlash has sort of become a lot louder. And you see a lot of fans who are arguing that this is kind of exploitative. You're basically kind of milking your most passionate supporters for as much money as you can take from them, you know. There's also a growing body of fans who are concerned about the environment, and they're worried that all these CDs and records, if they're not made in a sustainable way, are pretty wasteful. Again, because Taylor Swift is so big and because the album did have a pretty polarizing reaction, there's been a lot of chatter online about whether she needed to do this and whether she's kind of gone too far.

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SPEAKER 16: Having all 20 versions of the same album with the exact same music on it is wasteful, and it's very capitalist.

SPEAKER 17: And you shouldn't have this rush to buy one cover and then two days later, there might be another one that's out.

SPEAKER 18: Like, at this point, you could just tile a bathroom with how many different versions of one album she's put out.

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LEIGHT: I think it is that thing where I bet she probably could have broken the record without putting out 38 different versions. But if she wanted to get to 4 million, she only cleared that mark by 2,000 units, which is a pretty small amount.

KING: Yeah, she squeaked in.

LEIGHT: She squeaked by. So if 4 million is your goal, it might have been the 38th variant that got you there. They have the data. We don't. But again, whether or not artists should care about fairly arbitrary commercial goals is a valid question. But it seemed pretty clear that 4 million was the target.

KING: Do you think the new normal is 12 variants, 20 variants, 38 variants?

LEIGHT: I think for now, it definitely is. What we see happen, and we've seen it happen again and again, is artists, again, they care intensely about getting the biggest numbers possible. They'll come up with a strategy to do so, and then the chart rules will change, and they will have to adjust. So a while ago, there was a popular period in the music industry where you could bundle album sales with tickets. So you would find artists who had a really great live business selling just an album accompanying a tour ticket, and they would do huge numbers, which they could never achieve if they weren't able to link those two together. Then the bundling was kind of mostly banned and the new era came in, and now people are more into this variant strategy. At a certain point, if the chart rules change again, there will be a new system they come up with. I think the one thing you can guarantee is that artists and labels are always going to try to figure out whatever strategy they can use that first week.

KING: Elias Leight, WSJ MUX. Coming up, everyone's a critic.

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ANN POWERS: I'm Ann Powers. I'm a critic and correspondent for NPR Music. I have been called a Taylor Swift whisperer. [LAUGHS] I'm a music critic, and in that capacity, I have been writing about Taylor since she started making music back in the early, mid-2000s. So I'm not a Swiftie, but I definitely respect her, absolutely respect her as an artist, and as a businesswoman, and as a pop cultural phenomenon, and all the things. I found it really interesting to observe the backlash against Taylor Swift.

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SPEAKER 19: Some of those lyrics are AI generated. Can I prove it? No.

SPEAKER 20: Worst writing lyrically she has ever done in her entire career. Worst, tackiest, most out of touch, most childish.

SPEAKER: SPEAKER 21: I have been, for years, a huge, huge Taylor Swift fan. I would still consider myself a fan, but I do not like this album.

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POWERS: Which is more intense this year and with this release than it was with her previous release, The Tortured Poets Department, although that album also did incur a bit of a backlash. I'm most interested in how both critics and the general public are now responding to Taylor in a very different way than they did even about The Eras Tour. She is sort of like, I imagine her clinging to a giant pendulum as it swings back and forth.

[LAUGHTER]

POWERS: I feel that's what's happening with her. And this is possibly inevitable with anyone of her stature. I mean, she really occupies a unique space in popular culture, certainly in pop music. But I really think we're seeing it play out that Taylor Swift has become the avatar for so many of our anxieties, so many of our dissatisfactions, and that's pretty interesting to watch.

KING: Yeah, let's talk about some of the anxieties and dissatisfactions and whether or not Taylor Swift deserves this. So in the first half of the show, we talked about how Taylor Swift is a very, very successful businesswoman. No shock there. But two things happened with this album. The first is there are so many variants. There's a Target exclusive, "Crowd Is Your King" vinyl, there's the hairbrush that falls apart, there's a Tiny Bubbles in Champagne. It's on and on and on. So there's that. And then there's that a lot of people, when the album first dropped, decided they didn't really like it.

POWERS: Yes.

KING: How do we square those two things? Do those two facts depend on one another?

POWERS: They're in relationship with one another. I'm not sure if they depend on one another. What's interesting about the backlash about the album itself is that it seems to have been triggered by the leak of the lyrics for a particular song, "Actually Romantic." (SINGING) I heard you call me boring Barbie When the coke's got you brave

POWERS: Which is the song that allegedly is aimed at the pop star Charli XCX, an attack on her. (SINGING) Kind of making me wet

POWERS: Honestly, it is a pretty crass song. It's broad humor. It's not subtle. (SINGING) Everything is romantic

POWERS: And I think the timing of that leak was a big negative for the reception of this album.

KING: But Ann, it's not like, and then we realized that Taylor Swift is rich, and then we realized she's going to-- like, how did everyone become so irritated about the same thing?

[LAUGHTER]

POWERS: Yeah. I mean, this has been building for a while, actually. I think after Tortured Poets Department came out, since that time, I've started to see more and more online chatter about Taylor Swift's wealth, her social status, and her choice to continue to write songs in which she is the, quote unquote, "underdog," even though she is so on top of the world. Not coincidentally, I think, this was going on as a kind of larger backlash has been brewing against very wealthy Americans in general.

KING: And her response, Taylor's response is what exactly?

POWERS: Well, Swift did a small number of interviews upon the release of the record, and in one of them, on the Zane Lowe Show on Apple Music, she basically said--

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SWIFT: I'm not the art police. It's like, everybody is allowed to feel exactly how they want, and what our goal is as entertainers is to be a mirror.

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POWERS: Which I'm sure to her felt, you know, open hearted and confident and reasonable. But I think to others, that almost felt like, I don't care about your opinion.

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SWIFT: If it's the first week of my album release and you are saying either my name or my album title, you're helping.

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POWERS: So this was particularly exacerbating to Swifties, to fans, who also have been struggling. And that has been a notable part of this backlash. It's not only professional critics, it's not only online trolls who never liked Taylor Swift anyway. A lot of very diehard Taylor fans are also publicly raising doubts about their hero.

KING: Yeah, there is something to that "I don't care about feelings" vibe. Because if you listen to Taylor Swift's music, including songs on this album like-- (SINGING) Elizabeth Taylor

KING: To hear this artist who so frequently seems to be playing to us and telling us, hey, feel really bad for me, come out and say, oh, but I don't care what you think. This is not a two way street, guys.

POWERS: Well, this is where my opinion might differ from some others' opinions.

KING: Oh, tell me.

POWERS: I don't think she's playing the victim so much on Life of a Showgirl. I think she's playing the villain. I think she's inhabiting a role consciously in which she can express these negative emotions, but she's doing it in this very swaggering, macho way. The one song that truly does trouble me on this album is called "Canceled." (SINGING) Good thing I like my friends canceled

POWERS: And in that song, Taylor Swift is addressing her friends who have gone through struggles with the media that resemble the ones she's gone through. (SINGING) They're the ones with matching scars

POWERS: So those lyrics, you can read them several different ways, I suppose. The word canceled has been in the vernacular for a while, right? But in 2025, in the America of 2025, the word canceled hits a certain way. It's far more associated with the right, with the MAGA movement, and with President Trump himself than it is with anyone else. And I have to think Taylor Swift knew that. It's sort of, I mean, she may live in some kind of fame bubble, but it was surprising to me when I heard that song. And actually, I immediately thought, oh, this is risky, and not in a good way.

KING: A lot of people have asked whether a person can create great art when they are rich and happy. So I remember when Cowboy Carter came out and there was this line in one of the songs where Beyoncé talks-- "16 carriages," that was it-- where she talks about being-- (SINGING) overworked and overwhelmed

KING: And that line really triggered people. They were like, no, girl, you're not.

POWERS: [LAUGHS]

KING: So this is a similar type of pushback from a very, very broad audience.

POWERS: Beyoncé did something very smart and very deft, which I also think she did it out of conviction, which is that at a certain point in her career, she stopped speaking so much personally as representatively. She started connecting her personal stories with the history of racism and oppression. (SINGING) Little Malcolm, Martin mixed with Mama Tina Need another march, let me call Tamika Need peace and reparation for my people

POWERS: She's continued to do that. (SINGING) Freedom, I can't move Freedom, cut me loose, yeah

POWERS: Also uplifting her family, uplifting her community, as she's defined it. In that way, she has managed to make her music bigger than herself, make her art bigger than herself.

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KILO ALI: America-- America has a problem

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POWERS: Consider that next to Taylor Swift. She has very much clung to autobiography as the center of what she does.

KING: Beyoncé is, you're arguing, very clearly evolving. And Taylor Swift, and this is an argument I heard a lot about this album, she is not growing as an artist. What do you make of the critique that this album is an example, not that Taylor Swift isn't a great artist, but that she's not growing?

POWERS: I find it strange that being a pop star and producing albums is being talked about as if it is a life journey of self-improvement. I mean, have we asked that of-- did we ask that of Mick Jagger? I don't know. I don't necessarily think we did. Another thing is, I don't have any problem with someone writing songs about adolescence for their whole life. Like, that's fine with me. Now, do you want to hear my theory about the record?

KING: You're damn right I do.

POWERS: I don't think Taylor Swift made this record to make more money. I really don't. Like, does she need the money? Obviously not. I do think, however, that she's very interested in controlling her public narrative and controlling the narrative that she's building through her albums. She's very, very focused on her music being the center of everything. And I think she made this record because she is now in a happier place in her life, and she just can't stand the thought that that last album, Tortured Poets Department, which shows her at her most vulnerable, is the album that's going to stand as she's going through this happy phase, as she's getting married. She needed another marker on the highway. She needed a marker on the highway that said, hey, I'm happy now. I'm in control, I have power, I no longer feel the way I felt when I was wallowing in my own misery. Do I blame her for that? No, I don't blame her for that. I get it completely. But let's recognize it for what it is. It's a marker on her highway, and she's going to go somewhere else pretty soon.

HOROWITZ-GHAZI: That was NPR's Ann Powers speaking to Noel King from Today Explained. Today Explained is Vox's excellent daily news show. They tell one news story every afternoon. You can find it wherever you get your podcasts. This episode of Today Explained was produced by Ariana Aspuru, Amina Al-Sadi, Laura Bullard, and Adriene Lilly. I'm Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi. This is NPR. Thanks for listening.

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