I didn’t really want to write about the first round of “Taylor Swift blocks [other artist] on the charts” for a couple reasons… but mostly because her chart battle with Billie Eilish was hilarious and I didn’t really want to detract from this basic comedy by weighing it down with an opinion. Like. As Taylor, quoting the movie Gladiator once said: are you not entertained? I’m entertained. And I still think it was hilarious, incidentally. It felt like something that should be compiled in video of Top Ten Anime Battles.1
But since it’s happening again (this time in the UK, with opponent Charli xcx), I’m going to put out a newsletter about it. I have written this edition with the assumption you are vaguely aware of both of these incidents even if you did not follow them closely. But please understand before we enter into this is that my stance remains these things are funny and do not matter.
Here’s the thing about the Billboard charts, specifically, that I want to say as a preface to my Official BDM Industries Take:
They don’t really matter.
They are, like all lists and rankings, very fake and easily manipulated.
Everybody cares about them.
I mean… not everybody. Maybe a better way of putting it is: if you are aware of them, you care about them. For instance, I really like this one indie artist, Hannah Frances, and she has… like… twelve thousand monthly listeners on Spotify. She doesn’t care about Billboard, I would imagine, except maybe as a spectator sport.
The second thing to say going in is that Taylor is very, very competitive. Numbers matter a lot to her. And while art itself is not a competition—and for that reason I don’t totally agree with Taylor partisans who say things like “you wouldn’t ask a star athlete to lose so other people can win”—things like charts and awards… are.2 I personally like the shark side of Taylor’s nature and I also like that she’s stopped trying to make people overlook it. She just goes for it and lets people react however.3 But is it a little embarrassing and undignified, yes. Is it morally wrong, no.
And should Billboard4 change the rules to be something like “an album sale, for tracking purposes, is a single tracklist (no deluxes) with a single SKU per format”? Yes. It would cut down on a ton of waste. But… and I do think most people know this… Taylor will win if they do that too. It’s only a disadvantage for her if for some reason she’s banned from using variants while everybody else isn’t.
And with that said—my promised takes.
Chart battles, round one: Taylor Swift versus Billie Eilish.
Taylor releases six new digital variants over this week and ships another (along with some other restocked variants—nothing counts for Billboard until it ships).
Billie debuts with fifteen initial “variants” across various formats,5 then releases three more digital variants as the week goes on.
This one was interesting in that people really wanted it to be personal and/or about Old Crone Taylor being threated by Young Maiden Billie and lashing out. I don’t think it was (though it’s certainly possible one or both of them came out of the week with a grudge).6 Or, at least—I don’t think you need a grudge to explain anything that people did over the course of the week, and if you don’t need one… it’s probably not the source of the issue.7
First, Taylor: she will try to block anybody, including people she likes (SZA)8 and including men (Drake)9 or even her own protégés (Sabrina Carpenter in the UK, Olivia Rodrigo10 [in the brief period she could be so described] with the evermore vinyl).11 When she can avoid a fight she either doesn’t want to have or doesn’t think she can win, she does, either by coordinating release dates (which she has done with Paul McCartney and which I suspect but cannot prove she did with Beyonce)12 or by moving her own (as she did with Adele’s 30).13
Similarly, the remarks of Billie’s that swifties pulled out to act like they were directed at Taylor… probably weren’t. There was a music act that did forty+ vinyl variants (the number she mentioned), but it wasn’t Taylor, it was the Rolling Stones. In context, her calling a three hour concert “psychotic” was pretty clearly inspired by her contemplating having to do one herself. If you’ve paid any attention to Billie over the years you know that she tends to say things that she doesn’t phrase very carefully and which she then has to spend time clarifying.14
Now, I do sort of, kind of, suspect somebody15 on Billie’s team set the release date for her album thinking that Tortured Poets Department would be weak enough to get bumped from its number one spot. That would be a great headline for Billie, since her own album, Hit Me Hard and Soft, is a tight ten tracks rather than Tortured Poets’ sprawling thirty-one, and even though Billie also plays the variants game, the narrative doesn’t stick to her the same way. Unseating Taylor would let her have a kind of David and Goliath moment. It was a smart gamble, but it didn’t work out.16
However—that also isn’t personal. It’s just business.
Chart battles, round two: Taylor Swift versus Charli xcx.
Taylor releases six new-to-the-UK digital variants.
Charli debuts with twelve (?) vinyl variants, three (?) CD variants (and also a deluxe album, but I’m not sure if those count in the UK in the same way as they do on Billboard).17
I don’t think this one is necessarily personal either… but I think there is more evidence it could be given that there is a track on brat that is obviously about Taylor. So I can in fact see Taylor seeing that the gap between them was small enough for her to close with a little flex and being a little pissed about the album track about her.18
But the other thing is that… uh… well, per Forbes:
Swift released new U.K.-exclusive editions of “The Tortured Poets Department” on Thursday afternoon featuring live recordings and acoustic versions of songs, which were only available for sale until 11:59 p.m. Thursday evening—the end of the chart tracking week.
If digital downloads available for… less than a day…? are enough to screw up somebody’s number one debut, I’m not really sure they made such a difference.19 But it’s hard to say. I’m pretty sure almost nobody is aware of these digital variants except hardcore stans (and people like me) and also that nobody would buy them except hardcore stans, and those are, ultimately, a minority of any fanbase. Does Taylor have enough insane fans who are constantly glued to her store to buy them and would do so just to keep her at the top and for no other reason…?
I mean… yes. Obviously. Duh.
No, I think this chart war is more interesting in terms of the contents of the respective albums. brat is (in part) concerned with 1) whether or not Charli wants a certain kind of success at all 2) whether she wants it but can’t have it 3) or whether she doesn’t want it but could have it. Is her “cool outsider” pose authentic or is it just sour grapes? She isn’t sure, which is part of the tension that makes the album interesting. Thus she has some tracks where she seems to position herself as voluntarily choosing to stay more of a marginal act, some where she seems to fantasize about all but walking away from her career in favor of motherhood, and one where she seems to fantasize about committing a mass shooting at the Grammys for snubbing her again.20
A lot of Tortured Poets is also about fame and ambition; in Taylor’s case, she’s weighing the price her single-minded focus may have cost her. Like brat, it’s a very “I’m in my thirties and I feel life narrowing” kind of album. But it is also, as she has said, a fatalistic album in that Taylor acknowledges her choices without disavowing them or wishing she’d done something else. Taylor has probably felt internal conflict about a thousand things. But her artistic career isn’t one of them. If she was put back at age 13, knowing everything she knows now, she would just do what she did.
Lana recently gave an interview where she commented that Taylor is on top because she wants it more than anyone (and that Taylor herself has said this). I saw a lot of people interpret this statement as shady, but I doubt it. Taylor does want it more than anybody; just in terms of the text of her album versus the text of Charli’s, her certainty is the scissors to Charli xcx’s paper.
I think a consistent theme in these TSS posts is that Taylor’s “try hard” qualities is why she has loyal fans; it’s an essential ingredient of her star power and her charisma even though trying hard is supposed to be a turn-off. This ambition may lead her to do things that are stupid, embarrassing, self-sabotaging, or alienating, but it is consistent and it is a huge part of why she remains so successful.21 If I were her, would I have just sat back and watched how the week played out? Yes. But I guess what I’m saying is that that is one of (many) reasons that I’m not.
Taylor’s Mami, obviously.
Also… sports fans whine all the time. Everybody whines.
In 2019 she would have put out some kind of statement about how nobody accuses men of being too competitive. Not now. Please do not disappoint me on this score btw Taylor than you.
The UK can do whatever it wants.
There was certainly a lot of swiftie nastiness directed at Billie. Protip, swifties: do not make fun of somebody else for acting surprised at award ceremonies.
That said I will happily concede that I may simply not understand Petty Bitch Psychology.
Worth pointing out that both she and SZA made a point of indicating “this is just business, we’re fine” after Taylor came at SZA’s spot (and lost, incidentally—she does lose!). Also I wish they would collab…. “Down Bad (feat. SZA)” when. >:( >:( >:(
She won that one.
Sabrina won, Olivia lost.
I think there aren’t as many examples of her doing this to men because… there are not a lot of buzzy male acts right now. I mean—there are lots of male acts doing great. Coldplay, Morgan Wallen, Drake, Kendrick, The Weeknd, Bad Bunny, Ed Sheeran…. But they don’t get buzz and media attention in the same way.
I also suspect but cannot prove that Taylor will do a lot to avoid any kind of head to head contest with Beyonce, if only to avoid the ghost of Kanye at the VMAs, though if they both get nominated for Album of the Year she will campaign like normal.
I think if there are people she would not try to block, it’s probably like… 1) Jack 2) Lana 3) Aaron Dessner. And I’m only really sure about Jack.
Billie is actually following pretty closely the Jennifer Lawrence path to stardom of being a bit unfiltered and messy (and having your career closely intertwined with a single male creative, in her case her brother)… which… well, everybody likes a messy star right up until they don’t.
That one of her managers was retweeting various negative things about Taylor possibly makes this “somebody” easy to figure out, but who knows really.
That said, I think Billie will win Album of the Year unless there’s a dark horse candidate.
I’m having a little trouble figuring out if everything was available in the UK or not.
I think “Taylor is angry that Matty Healy got engaged to Charli xcx’s friend” is, on the other hand, a stupid read of the situation.… if she’s personally mad she is personally mad at Charli herself.
ETA: According to this source, which is apparently reliable, the final numbers were:
01) 35,941 Taylor Swift - THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT
[17,136 CDs, 1,481 vinyl, 5 cassettes, 1,134 downloads, 16,185 streaming]
02) 27,234 Charli XCX - BRAT
[6,077 CDs, 10,687 vinyl, 339 cassettes, 507 downloads, 9,624 streaming]
So if that’s right… the digital downloads didn’t really matter at all.
In a funny way the fact that I find Charli xcx’s “persona” very annoying is part of why I actually liked brat quite a bit even though I don’t usually like her music much. I know hyperpop is a whole thing with its own history blah blah blah but mostly when I try to listen to a Charli xcx album I just hear this:
For instance, if I were her, I would pay attention to the fact that a lot of her own fanbase has not liked the way she rolled out Tortured Poets.
I’ve been asked to pass along a comment from the peanut gallery: “XCX is supposed to be in capital letters not lowercase letters”
(1) sending this to my pro-Charli, Taylor-skeptical group chat currently blowing up over this
(2) thank you for the Hannah Frances mention, this is new to me and Extremely My Shit (feels like her deal is similar to Laura Marling, who i adore)