Today, Explained - Capitalism (Taylor’s Version)

Episode Date: October 24, 2025

Taylor Swift reaches new heights with her latest album, which is both divisive and record-breaking. This episode was produced by Ariana Aspuru, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Adriene Lilly, and hosted by Noel King. Fans posing with Taylor Swift's latest album 'The Life of a Showgirl." Photo by Maya Dehlin Spach/Getty Images. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. New Vox members get $20 off their membership right now. Transcript at ⁠vox.com/today-explained-podcast.⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I heard you call me boring Barbie when the Coke's got you brave. Taylor Swift's new record got everybody mad. It's sloppy, they said. It's immature. It's mid. Some listeners were disappointed. It didn't sound as advertised. This is a sad day to be a Swifty, and that's just my truth.

She's too happy. She's too cruel. She's breaking trad. Taylor, what do you have to say? But it's actually so. Coming up All the time you've spent on me It's honestly a wild

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My name's Taylor Swift. I have a single coming out in 10 days. It's called... Today Explained. Yes, it's called. Today explained. Today explained. No, it's not about... Today explained. My full name is Elias Light, and I report on music for the Wall Street Journal. Are you a Taylor Swift fan? I am a little more of the early stuff, a little less of the more recent stuff. What did you think of a new record? It was not my favorite, but again, as a reporter, I try to keep that out of what we write, you know? You don't want to tell me what your beef with it was?

I mean, more of a melody and rhythm guy than a lyric guy, but I found some of the lyrics to sort of be cringy to a level where they pulled me completely out of the experience of listening. Every joke's just trolling in memes, sad as it seems. Apathy is hard. She set a record, as I understand it, for her biggest debut week. How big was it? 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. Hello, it's me. 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. We need to fight like the Spotify thing. I really believe that we in the music industry can work together to find a way to bond technology with integrity. And when Adele dropped that out,

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 that massive first single. And she 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. I pre-saved my album on Spotify. Did you?

Hey, it's Sabrina. You can presave my new album short and sweet on Spotify now. But sort of a new technique has become popular for the first week, which has released 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 kind of boost your first week sales numbers. Okay, 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. 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. 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. I think it's genius. If they're buying it, why not keep giving it to them? 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. My life of a showgirl Cardigan just came in. Cardigan arrived in pretty box. I mean, I don't even own a CD player, but I have a CD now. now. Some of the vinyl came with different jewelry items. There was like a bracelet people liked, a necklace. That is why I bought one, two, and three. I got the hairbrush and the barrette, so let's open it out. Some of the CDs came with bonus acoustic tracks. There were also the digital download versions that came with bonus acoustic tracks.

Some of them had voice memos from Taylor about songs that she'd done instead of the acoustic. Opalite is a song on my album that I think is just so infectiously, contagiously. So there was a really wide range of options for the super Taylor fan. I'm not going to say it's cheating because all's fair and love. love and capitalism. But album variants are very clearly a strategy to boost sales numbers. Why? 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 sort of the commercial reception of their work. They want to say they got a top 10,

a top five, ideally a number one. The problem with streaming, right, is for the listener, it's like this amazing offering where you're paying $11 a month for almost all the music in history, right? 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 kind of 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. So I bought every single vinyl and CD variant for Taylor's The Life of a Showgirl, so you don't have to.

Oh, it's so pretty. Side A. Oh, my God. Look at the rippling. 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 kind of push every lever that is available for them to get a big. first week. 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? 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. kind of tight races for number one. And last year, there was a race that turned a lot of heads. 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 a run. This is a chess move. Sabrina's 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. Honestly, she didn't come to play. She took courses from Ms. Taylor Swift on how to secure that number one album.

I'm sorry. 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. 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. This is a really interesting way to kind of game the music business, which of course is a business, as these artists know. Is there anyone lobbying critiques at this strategy? 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, 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's so big and because the album did have a pretty polarizing reaction, there's been a lot of chatter online about sort of whether she needed to do this and whether she's kind of gone too far. Having all 20 versions of the same album with the exact same music on it is wasteful and it's very capitalist. And you shouldn't have this rush to like buy one cover and then two days later there might be another one that's out. Like at this point you could just tile a bathroom with how many different versions of one album she's put out. 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, right? Oh, yeah, she squeaked in.

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 sort of care about fairly art. arbitrary commercial goals is a valid question, but it seemed pretty clear that $4 million was the target. Do you think the new normal is 12 variants, 20 variants, 38 variants? I think for now it definitely is.

What we see happen, and we've seen it happen again and again, is sort of artists, again, they care intensely about boost 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, right? 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 kind of link those two together. Then the bundling was kind of

mostly banned and sort of the new era came in and now people are more into this variance 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 to maximize that first week. Elias Light, W-S-J-M-U-X Coming up, everyone's a critic. Rinse takes your laundry and hands It takes your laundry and hand delivers it to your door, expertly cleaned and folded.

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We'd love to talk, business. Today, explain. I'm Anne Powers. I'm a critic and correspondent for NPR music. I have been called a Taylor Swift Whisperer. 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-2000. So I'm not a Swifty, but I definitely respect her, absolutely respect her as an artist and as a businesswoman and as a businesswoman and as a pop cultural phenomenon and all the things. I've found it really interesting to observe the backlash against Taylor Swift.

Some of those lyrics are AI generated. Can I prove it? No. Worst writing, lyrically, as she has ever done in her entire career. Worst, tackiest, most out of touch, most childish. I have been four years a huge huge Taylor Swift fan. I was still considering myself a fan, but I do not like this out. 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 ERIS tour. She is sort of like, I imagine her clinging to a giant pendulum, it swings back and forth. 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 avatars for so many of our anxieties, so many of our dissatisfactions.

And that's pretty interesting to watch. Yeah, let's talk about some of the anxieties and dissatisfactions in 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 a hairbrush that falls apart. There's a tiny bubble in a champagne collection. Right. It's 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. Yes. How do we square those two things? Do those two facts depend on one another?

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. I heard you call me boring Barbie when the coke's got you brain. Which is the song that allegedly is aimed at the pop star Charlie X-E-X, an attack on her. Honestly, it is a pretty crass song, you know? It's broad humor. It's not subtle.

Yeah. And I think the timing of that leak was a big negative for the reception of this album. But, Anne, it's not like, and then we realize that Taylor Swift is rich, or and then we realize she's going to, like, what, how did everyone become so irritated about the same thing? 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. And her response? Taylor's response is what exactly? 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,

I'm not the art gleece. It's like everybody is allowed to feel exactly how they want. And what our goal is as entertainers is to be a mirror. 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. If it's the first week of my album release, and you are saying either my name or my album title, you're helping. 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. Yeah, there is something to that I don't care about your feelings. feelings vibe. Because if you listen to Taylor Swift's music, including songs on this album like Elizabeth Taylor, 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. Well, this is where my opinion might differ from some other opinions. Oh, tell me. 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. 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. 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, you know, 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. 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 Beyonce talks, 16 carriages, that was it, where she talks about being overworked and overwhelmed. And that line really triggered people. They were like, no, girl, you're not. There is, so this is a similar type of pushback from a very, very broad audience. Beyonce did something very smart and very deft,

which I also think was, you know, 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, you know, oppression. Little Malcolm, my miss from Mamma Tina, need another march, let me got to me. She's continued to do that. Freedom, I can't move.

Freedom caught me loose. Freedom. Also, uplifting her family, uplifting her community, as she's defined it. In that way, she has managed to sort of make her music bigger than herself, make her art bigger than herself.

America, America has a problem. Consider that next to Taylor Swift. She has very much. clung to autobiography as the center of what she does. Beyonce 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? I find it strange that being a pop star and producing album, is sort of being talked about as if it is a life journey of self-improvement. I mean, that's just like, do we, have we asked that of, did we ask that of Mick Jagger? You know, 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? You're damn right, I do. I don't think Taylor Swift made this record to make more money. 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, you know, 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. Anne Powers NPR Music Critic. Today's team, Ariana Espudo, Amina El Sadi, Laura Bullard, and Adrian Lilly.

As Ted Herndon starts with us next week, he's going to be filling in for Sean for the next couple months. I'm Noelle King. It's today explained. You know,