Taylor Swift Has Already Released 34 Editions of Her Latest Album. Her Goal: To Never Leave the Charts

Taylor Swift is undoubtedly one of today’s best-selling artists. Her latest album, The Tortured Poets Department, already holds several sales and reach records, including the highest number of streams in one day on Spotify, a debut with 1.9 million albums sold in its first week, and becoming the first artist to monopolize the Billboard Top 14.

Indeed, we’ll focus on the fact that Swift isn’t just in the business of releasing an album and counting bills. Behind this is a careful marketing strategy based on the oldest trick in the book: saturating the market.

Swift is bulldozing the market. About a month ago in mid-June, Charli XCX—an artist with a style comparable to Swift’s, though a bit more sophisticated—entered the charts like a whirlwind, going straight to number 2 with her album BRAT. Swift singer didn’t take long to respond, releasing a new exclusive edition of The Tortured Poets Department in the UK—where Charli XCX is from—accompanied by some extras such as homemade demos and bonus tracks recorded live in Paris.

She did the same to Billie Eilish. This is neither the first nor the last time that Swift has carried out this sabotage by saturation, knowing that her fans will buy every single copy of her albums. At the beginning of June, she did it to another heavyweight, Billie Eilish. In fact, it stands to reason that Eilish must have seen it coming given that a few months earlier, she had some very harsh words for the industry about the environmental waste involved in releasing dozens of versions of the same album, pointing out vinyl manufacturing and packaging is a costly process. However, shortly after Eilish had to clarify that she wasn't directing her words to any artist in particular.

But how many album editions are we talking about? More than 30, and the number keeps growing. Indeed, the very first special edition was a tricky one. It turned out that the standard edition of The Tortured Poets Department was incomplete. In fact, the definitive version included about thirty songs. From there, countless special editions, primarily digital, simply added a bonus track to the set. But everything counts as sales for The Tortured Poets Department. Some fans have bought the same album dozens of times, catapulting its sales.

She’s not the only one. But Swift isn’t the only one to practice this kind of record blitzkrieg, which turned the charts upside down and led her to stay at number one for 12 weeks, three months after the album’s release. Naturally, the industry is interested in the phenomenon, and many more artists are following her, albeit to a lesser extent. Luminate Data released a study mid-year that found that the top 10 best-selling albums of the year in the U.S. each had an average of seven different vinyl versions, two cassette editions, and 13 CDs.

Olivia Rodrigo is another example. She's released a dozen vinyl versions of her Guts album, which has spent 44 weeks on the Billboard 200 since its release last September. Given collector devotion and unique items like a vinyl box set that includes scented candles, she’s on track for a year on the charts.

Physical formats are still physical formats. Let’s not forget that although these artists have a young audience that usually listens to music on cell phones and social networks, it’s normal for labels to try to make purchasing physical editions attractive: Selling a single album is the equivalent to 1,500 listens on Spotify in real profits. The interest and investment in these products are unsurprising, especially when it comes to cases like Swift, who sells through her website without going through intermediaries.

South Korea is to blame. Ask an unsuspecting observer where this fanatical behavior of Swift’s fans comes from, and they might point to Beatlemania or, at best, boy band groups from the turn of the century. Today, Swift’s model is undoubtedly the same as the one K- and J-Pop groups use that keep the CD alive in the charts—it’s still a trendy format in South Korea and Japan. There, multiple editions of albums are standard, each with a cover dedicated to each band member.

How long will this tactic continue? This kind of “bad collecting” boomed during the pandemic when lockdowns encouraged hoarding. However, Luminate referenced an increase in countless versions of the same album in the second quarter of 2020. But after years of buoyant sales, music sales in physical formats have slowed to just 3.8% year-over-year growth in the first half of 2024. A report by the Vinyl Alliance, cited by Variety, speaks of “hit saturation” in the market.

It looks like Swift might have to find another way to hack the charts.

This article was written by John Tones and originally published in Spanish on Xataka.

Image | Taylor Swift

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