The truth behind Taylor Swift’s groundbreaking success and unmatched numbers: a debuking thread.

As we all know, Taylor Swift is undoubtedly one of the biggest artists out there. Looking at her huge sales, one might think that she’s basically on top of the world, her music gets played everywhere, everybody talks about her and so on. However, this doesn’t reflect the reality.

The truth is intricate, odd for some and hard to accept for others - her fans - who will always and unequivocally be in denial.

Let’s start by saying Taylor Swift does everything in her power to increase her sales. Throughout her career she sold merch bundles, a bunch of deluxe and different versions of her albums, applied various gimmicks such as : purchase multiple copies or no access to tour tickets.

Some would call this genius marketing, others would call it desperation, mental gymnastics, chart-obsession. Point of views, I guess. The fact remains that she also throat-shoved her music with tons of promotion: from live performances and interviews to billboards everywhere.

The biggest example is definitely 1989, her peak era, which had a 18-months promotional campaign.

Taylor is also known for milking her albums, most of which have about 6/7 singles with respective music videos.

Of course this huge amount of marketing strategies generates big sales, but do they really reflect actual popularity and impact? Let’s analyze this situation below...

Taylor’s latest album sold 846k first week in the US... of those 846k units you would expect at least half of them to be streams, right? Well not in Taylor’s case. She sold 615k physical copies. That means that 75% of her sales were people buying merch bundles / physical copies.

This is important because streaming shows how many people are actually *listening* to your music. Since 1 album sale = 1500 streams, it is much more impressive to get streams than pure album sales.

I’m gonna go into further detail and attempt to explain “statistically” why Taylor Swift sells so many physical copies.

Let’s start by saying that in business there’s a thing called an 80/20 rule. That means that 20% of your audience/consumers/etc. make up 80% of your profits.

For example, the hardcore 20% of Drake (but also Rihanna, Ariana and many other artists) fans would make up for 80% of his sales whereas the majority (80%) of Drake “fans” that just listen to whatever is popular (GP) would only make up 20% of his sales.

I brought this up just to say that this rule just doesn’t apply to Taylor Swift. She doesn’t have a 20% hardcore and 80% casual audience. Her audience is 80% hardcore and 20% casual. So when she puts out physical copies those die hard fans will buy them to increase her sales.

Apart from all the gimmicks I’ve mentioned, a reason why her fans are so dedicated is mostly due to nostalgia. It’s easy to market something with nostalgia because a feeling is attached to it. And since Taylor Swift is a clean cut white girl lots of kids grew up listening to her.

Rich white parents had no problem buying their kid a Taylor Swift album. So now that those kids are grown she caters to that audience by making slightly more explicit music n those kids are now adults/teens so they listen for nostalgia and buy bunch of copies to climb her sales.

Nobody really pays much attention to her outside of her hardcore fanbase. This is why her songs don’t last very long on the charts and her second/third week sales are always significantly lower than her first week numbers.

However, all these pure sales don’t make Taylor Swift an album artist. Album artists are the ones who have a very “old” audience (40+ yo people) who is still used to buy albums... but they don’t waste their money, they will actually listen to it in physical format.

The thing about Taylor Swift fans is that they purchase physical copies (and not only one copy each, but multiple ones very often) in genuine attempt to make her sales look higher.

Let’s take her last album as an example. She released 17 versions and multiple fans purchased all of them. Now, Billboard considers a fan buying 17 copies equivalent to 25,500 streams, when there’s NO way they’ll be listening to it that many times, at least not in a single week.

The funniest thing is that the fan will end up streaming the album when they want to listen to it anyway, so if you think about it her sales have close to 0 value. Here’s the difference with album artists, since their fans actually buy their albums (1 copy) to listen to them.

I’ve made this thread for delusional Swifties who think all of her achievements are rightfully earned. Stop giving her the legacy title because she did NOT make it there organically. Celebrating her “success” is right, but please don’t ever compare her to legends using numbers.

While she has household and solid albums i.e. Fearless, Red and 1989, which spawned multiple hits, y’all can tell the rest of her discography is pretty much unknown outside of her fanbase or the hardcore country community. No WW hits, no impact, nothing.

Also, her last two albums are the epitome of what I’ve just described and decided to call the “Taylor Swift phenomenon”. Both on top of the best selling lists, yet still no smashes, no international implications, pretty much no noise.

In the end: in such a case, sales don’t equal impact and numbers won’t build you a memorable legacy. While it’s impressive to have such a huge and dedicated fanbase, an artist’s influence is mainly shown by their charisma and ability to break through people’s hearts, everytime.

Now I know that Taylor Swift fans will attack me, call me obsessed and attempt to deny all these claims in any possible way, but - I’m sorry - that’s the raw and sad truth, and y’all could as well just accept it. Have a good day!

By the way, if you want to know more about her fraudulent gimmicks, you can check them here: https://twitter.com/fuckyanext/status/1286983314654535682?s=21