As you’ve almost certainly heard by now, Taylor Swift’s twelfth studio album, The Life of a Showgirl, will hit stores in October.
Taylor announced the album during a surprise appearance on Travis and Jason Kelce’s “New Heights” podcast.
In the weeks since, she’s been putting her masterful self-promotion skills to work, introducing seemingly endless “variant” limited editions that fans can preorder for a brief window of time.
Taylor’s album ‘variants’ remain big-ticket items
Without fail, the variants sell like hot cakes, and Team Taylor begins teasing another round of collectible vinyls shortly thereafter.
The fans get a rare piece of Taylor memorabilia, and Swift gets to make millions from the sale of physical media in an age when almost no one is doing that.
It’s a win-win, right? Well, that depends on who you ask.
This week marked the release of the “Tiny Bubbles in Champagne Collection,” the seventh TLOAS variant thus far.
As usual, the countdown and subsequent release were met with tremendous excitement from the most diehard fans (or at least the ones who can afford to keep shelling out for all of these limited editions).
Variants receive criticism from Swifties and non-fans alike
But across social media — even within the Swifty community — a new type of criticism is emerging.
We’ll call it “variant fatigue” (even though that sounds like an unpleasant throwback to the height of the Covid pandemic).
“You cannot convince me that she still puts out music strictly because she loves it and not because she wants to suck every penny possible from her fans,” actress and musician Alexandra Lains wrote on X (formerly Twitter) this week.
“There’s no reason to be releasing multiple versions of an album that no one has even heard yet,” Lains continued, adding, She is literally the fast fashion of music.”
The unflattering comparisons to companies like Shein continued over on Reddit:
“She is absolutely the fast fashion of music. Fast fashion has no originality, falls apart, and is chock full of rip-offs of small designers and designer dupes,” one user wrote.
“Blandie rips off other artists, has cardigans that literally fall apart, and copies what she thinks is currently trending,” this person continued, adding:
“I hate that she’s stuffed down everyone’s throat. I hate that 40 year old women act like lunatics over her. It’s bizarre behavior.”
Needless to say, the decision to churn out endless variants (there’s no telling how many we might receive between now and the October 3 release date) has been a controversial one.
But as many fans have pointed out, Taylor’s certainly not the first artist to take that tack.
In fact, Charli XCX released 40 limited editions of her Brat album just last year.
So Taylor’s certainly in good company. But being the biggest star on the planet has its downsides — and endless criticism from outsiders is one of them.