When Taylor Swift releases new music, I am seated. I went to the Fearless tour when I was seven years old, and I’ve been a fan ever since. And, like many fans, I consider her most recent album, Life of a Showgirl, the lowest point of her songwriting career so far. When the album came out last October, the Guardian gave it two stars, and Pitchfork wrote that “her music’s never been less compelling.” The album’s ‘encore’ (the cute, Swiftian term for its deluxe edition) dropped last Friday, and it didn’t do much to redeem the original tracklist. (Telegraph critic Poppie Platt said it best: “I’m a Swiftie, and even I think these new songs are terrible.")
But I’m not here to rant about why Swift failed to sell me on Ohio’s second-largest city or why she failed to sell basically anyone on any of these songs. What I am here to rant about: Even though the new music has fans begging her to take a break, the chart-predicting platform Talk of the Charts has forecast Swift taking four of the top five Billboard Hot 100 spots next week. They’re predicting that 'Patient Zero' (which is accompanied by a dramatic music video starring Dakota Johnson and Colin Farrell) will snag the top spot, dethroning Ella Langley’s “Choosin’ Texas” after 24 weeks. 'Patient Zero' has already broken a Spotify record: Within a day of its release, the song became Spotify’s most-streamed song by a female artist in a single day in 2026. And, as of Monday morning, the new songs reportedly occupied the top four spots on Spotify’s Top 50 - Global list. (At the time of writing, the songs no longer occupy the top four spots but are all still in the top 50.)
So even if Swift can't sell us on her new music, she’s having no trouble selling it to us. The original album, too, broke sales records and charts records alike. Her ability to set a new sales standard with each album, regardless of the album’s quality, is a trait that the public used to begrudgingly admire; many headlines have been written about Swift’s business acumen. But with TLOAS: Encore, the public’s patience with her sales stunts seems to be wearing thin.
Swift has received plenty of praise for her songwriting skills since she debuted in the late aughts, but her business instincts have been admired for almost as long. In 2014, the year she definitively pivoted into pop music with 1989, her fifth studio album, Time Magazine wrote that “Swift knows how to create albums people will pay for.” The singer is also credited with popularizing ‘eras’ – distinct aesthetic profiles to accompany the sound of each new album – in mainstream pop, which she’s spoken about as a way for female artists to ‘stay relevant’ in a business eager to replace them with their younger peers. Perhaps most famously, Swift engaged in a years-long dispute over the ownership of her masters, which she ultimately bought back in 2025.
In these cases, Swift was often celebrated for her business savvy. But in more recent years, her strategies have raised some eyebrows. She’s been criticized all over the internet for ‘chart-blocking’ other artists, especially other women – the accusation is that she frequently releases music or makes an announcement on the same day that another popstar has scheduled a big release, so that Swift's work maintains No. 1 status.
Essentially, Swift was incentivizing fans to buy the same album four times.
Similarly, Swift is an expert at juicing sales by releasing near-identical versions of the same record. Back in 2022, Swift was criticized for releasing four vinyl versions of her album Midnights, exactly the same except for their colour, and except for the fact that all four back covers could be arranged to create the image of a clock. Essentially, Swift was incentivizing fans to buy the same album four times.
For her 2024 album The Tortured Poets Department, she ramped it up, selling 36 digital and physical versions of the album. And even before the encore dropped, The Life of a Showgirl was released in over 30 forms, including CDs, vinyls, cassettes, and various downloadable versions of the album, such as the “Deluxe so Glamorous Cabaret Version” and the “Deluxe so Punk on the Internet” version.
People online had thoughts, many of which can be summed up by a Reddit comment, upvoted 3,000 times, that simply reads: “Cash grab.” The economics of Swift’s strategy are, after all, brilliant: Paul Crosby writes for The Conversation about how Swift’s limited-edition releases play on Swifties’ intense FOMO, luring them into purchasing yet another version of the same album so that they don’t regret not purchasing.
At the same time, as Crosby points out, too many variants of the same album start to feel nakedly profit motivated, and even exploitative, of fans’ passion – especially since Taylor Swift officially crossed the billionaire threshold in fall 2023. Fans are starting to wonder: if every new version is just a cash grab, what does she even need all that cash for?
Showgirl’s encore does, at least, actually contain new music, giving it a stronger value proposition than at least 30 of the album’s other variants. But when the encore sounds like just another entry into a long list of hollow Showgirl repeats, it’s still easy to feel a bit ripped off.
I’d wager that, even if the songs were good, reception would’ve still been lukewarm at best. It’s true that lots of listeners are still buying what Taylor Swift is selling – she’s got the streaming numbers to prove it – but more and more of us are starting to suffer from Swift Fatigue. She might be an incredible businesswoman, but her most recent album, in all 39 of its current forms, is being sold to listeners less like a work of art and more like a consumer product.
Oh well. Such is the life of a showgirl, I suppose.
