NEAR TRUTHS:
A SWIFTIAN POP UNIVERSE

VERSIONS OF TAYLOR: Who, other than Taylor Swift, could score 2023’s biggest chart debut with a re-record of an album from 2010? Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) bows with 712k in its first week, with 70% of that in physical retail. Meanwhile, tracks from the Republic superstar’s reimagined set (including previously unreleased “from the vault” material) dominated the upper reaches of the DSP charts immediately upon release.

Her prior set, Midnights, which dropped last fall with 1.6m in its first week, is the #3 album YTD and has amassed 5.3m in ATD, produced the smash “Anti-Hero,” which is on the verge of becoming her first song since the 1989 album to hit 1b streams on Spotify. Seven Swift titles appear on our YTD Top 50 chart. Interestingly, streaming will only account for 30% of the new Speak Now’s first-week total. The SEA percentage for Midnights in its first frame was similar.

Tay was already making mountains of cash with her Eras Tour, which—in addition to astronomical turnstile business—has been driving big streams of assorted catalog and moving gobsmacking amounts of merch. Each new (or old) drop brings astounding new revenue streams with orchid-tinted vinyl, custom cardigans and who knows what all else. As far as marketing is concerned, she is unmatched.

Swifties are up for anything, and in addition to their reliable spending power, they are a force on the socials (she boasts 267m followers on Instagram—that’s Top 15 on the platform, in case you were wondering) and have vouchsafed the primacy of Tay’s brand for the foreseeable future. When her BMLG catalog was sold, she simply got to work remaking those albums, and the fans were instantly on board.

Taylor Swift released her first full-fledged pop record a decade ago, and she is alone in the class of pop acts who were her contemporaries in navigating the new economy. This is testimony to many things: the continued resonance of her songwriting, her evolution as a performer, even her auteur-like skill as a video director. But perhaps more than anything else, it’s about how cannily she has leveraged her fan base. Maybe there is a bigger star than Tay at this point—though we’re beginning to doubt it—but is there a bigger artist brand?

TOP OF THE POPS: Taylor’s current romp takes place in a musical landscape that is radically different from the pop-dominated world of just a few years ago. And while acts traditionally construed as pop may not have the vice-like grip they once had on the marketplace, a handful of superstars—Adele, Harry Styles, Ed Sheeran, Beyoncé, Miley Cyrus (who has the year’s biggest single in “Flowers”), Billie Eilish and The Weeknd, to name a few—continue to play the game at an exceptionally high level. Sophomore efforts are in the offing from new queens Olivia Rodrigo (whose new track is big and not going anywhere) and Dua Lipa, while SZA has found a clear lane to pop stardom—and has the #2 album YTD. When the mix of star and song is on point, even in the era of Morgans and Bunnys, pop can still be the biggest thing in the world.

Drake, for all his hip-hop bona fides, occupies a pop category all his own; while not every release has been stratospheric over the past few years, he too has proved particularly savvy about reading the marketplace. Her Loss, his massive 2022 collab with 21 Savage, remains a Top 10 album in YTD activity with 2m ATD. A new album is imminent.