Taylor Swift - Midnights (October 21, 2022) Album • Page 66

Taylor Swift is the Michael Jackson equivalent of this generation and spans from little kids to 40-somethings. Not sure why this isn't almost expected really. My students at school know every song she's ever written. They're not into anything else like that.

 

WAIT I hadn't watched the Anti-Hero video yet and omg John Early Mike Birbiglia and Mary Elizabeth Ellis are all in this????? incredible

 

Honestly a superstar trio

 

It's actually reassuring to see Justin can't reliably hit those insanely low notes live. That shit just wouldn't even be fair given what he can do with the rest of his range.

 

So this TikTok doesn’t capture the start but I feel like the audio is better

 

Just gave this another shot, on a longer train journey; just not clicking with me, at all. “Dear Reader” is still the only track I care to go back to. So weird the music ideas chosen for this album are so bland

 

Sorry, but no one has the level of ubiquity of Michael Jackson. Taylor is a phenomenal songwriter and pop star, but this album is on pace to do around five times as well as the last two and almost twice as good as Lover in its opening frame despite being much more muted in tone. This is unexpected.

 

Did vinyl count for first week of folklore? I seem to recall that being right before the changed the preorder rule.

 

It's almost like people having no idea what to expect from the biggest artist currently making music made a lot of people stream it/buy it. I also think Swifties are on another level right now and are spending insane amounts of money on this.

 

yes it did, but the rule changed before evermore

 

I think it's probably a perfect storm of things: the vinyl being available on day one, the various collectible versions, the viral videos, the rollout that stoked a lot of curiosity about what the album would be, the 3am songs, "Anti-Hero" being a more natural "single" than "cardigan" or "willow," the fact that this year otherwise hasn't really had a ton of blockbuster releases, the anticipation of her (probably) touring for the first time in more than half a decade, etc. I'm still surprised by just how well it's doing, but I think it has a lot of things going for it, where the last three albums were missing at least a few of them.

 

yep, she was the last week to use the preorder. Katy Perry's Smile came out a week or two later and absolutely tanked because the preorders weren't shipped promptly.

 

I've heard through the grapevine that UMG shipped somewhere around 600k D2C items on the first day. Just... what?

It was very smart of her team to come up with a way to sell exactly four vinyl at a time, since that's the limit before Billboard counts it as a bulk sale.

 

Oh yeah, I remember that now. Rough break for Katy on that one.

Jesus Christ.

 

She truly is the queen of capitalism, I don’t think there’s another artist out there that squeezes every possible fan dollar out of a project.

Good for her, a PJ isn’t cheap.

 

björk, albeit the scales are different

 

I was madly impressed by the logistics of it all, but as a follow up I was like "who the heck is buying all this stuff?!?" Need to do some digging on what products are being sold.

 

I'd be very interested to see a breakdown of how many of those were single-item orders (bought a record, bought a CD, etc.) versus people buying a bunch of shit (all four vinyl versions, or some combination therein).

 

I picture her diving in her pools of money like scrooge mcduck.

 

i know in the past her big hypercapitalist gimmick has been making you feel like buying one version of the album only gives you several pieces of a whole product. originally this was just done through bonus tracks, but the 1989 Polaroids, the 2 rep magazines, the 4 Lover journals, and i guess the many variants of folklore were a step up that didn't necessarily click. yet convincing fans that you should shell out either $92 or $170 (before shipping) to turn 4 copies of the same album into a wall clock somehow worked this time around?

 

Did others' preorder vinyl ship? I haven't heard anything about my order yet.

 

my sister is still waiting on hers. mine shipped a day after hers and yet i got mine last Saturday, while hers is still in Ferndale, Michigan.

 

Yeah, I guess the difference is that you can display the physical clock in a way that doesn't work for previous collectible. If you want to know what's in the Lover journals you can probably just go to a fan page, etc.

 

I ordered the reg cover (for a friend) and blood moon cover off her site, also ordered the blood moon one from Target (for display)--I got the Target order a couple days ago, and the reg cover on Tues this week. But the blood moon one from her site, shipped day after the reg cover and is still in damn Ferndale.

 

Mine is still there too!