To quote the tagline for the 2010 film The Social Network, “You don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies.”
In the case of Taylor Swift, it’s more like “you don’t amass a billion freakin’ fans without acquiring a handful of haters.”
And thanks to her poison pen and sharp tongue, quite a few of Tay’s enemies are fellow celebrities.
However, her latest (allegedly) burned bridge has nothing to do with her lyrics and everything to do with her record-breaking album sales.
Ed Sheeran has been friends with Taylor since they were both starting out as young, up-and-coming singer-songwriters.
They’ve collaborated on songs together, and Tay has even described Ed as being like a second brother to her.
But the music biz is a competitive one — especially in this day and age, when so few fans actually buy music — and it seems that Ed was not happy about finding himself unexpected competition with the industry’s biggest star.
Has Ed become Taylor’s newest hater?
According to a new report from the Daily Mail, Ed was shocked to learn that Taylor would be dropping The Life of a Showgirl just three weeks after the release of his most recent album, Play.
“Ed takes these things really seriously and carefully plans his album releases. He announced his album with four months’ notice, but then Taylor announced hers for just two weeks after,” a source tells the outlet.
“It left his team scrabbling to get as much attention before hers dropped.”
Ed, of course, is not the first industry insider to accuse Taylor of using shady tactics to ensure that no other artist matches her success.
“He was very much put out and understandably peeved. It is not the first time that Taylor has done something like this. She’s got form.”
The ‘Showgirl’ controversies continue
Even fans have called Taylor out for the endless variants of the new album, which seemed to serve no purpose aside from lining her pockets and artificially inflating her sales figures.
And then there are the controversies pertaining to the album’s lyrics.
Taylor seemed to punch down at Charli XCX on “Actually Romantic,” a move that didn’t sit well with some listeners.
Of course, Tay has a long history of throwing shade at fellow artists, so that didn’t come as too much of a surprise.
But on “Opalite,” Swift seemed to take a shot at Kayla Nicole, an ex-girlfriend of Travis Kelce’s who’s never been involved in the music industry.
So Sheeran might be forced to keep this particular beef to himself — after all, the last thing anyone wants is to be immortalized in one of Taylor’s diss songs.