Taylor Swift Returns to the Top of the Charts

Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift once again has the number one album in the country:

Taylor Swift’s Evermore returns to No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart for a fourth nonconsecutive week on top, as the set vaults 74-1 with 202,000 equivalent album units earned in the U.S. in the week ending June 3 (up 1,709%), according to MRC Data. Of that sum, album sales comprise 192,000 (up 8,307%) — marking the biggest sales week of 2021. It surpasses the previous largest sales week of the year, when Swift’s Fearless (Taylor’s Version) sold 179,000 in its first week (chart dated April 24).

Taylor Swift Set for David O. Russell Movie

Taylor Swift

The Hollywood Reporter:

Taylor Swift will be back on the big screen, appearing in David O. Russell’s latest film.

The movie stars Margot Robbie, Christian Bale and John David Washington, with a massive cast that also includes Rami Malek, Zoe Saldana, Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Rock, Mike Myers, Robert De Niro, Michael Shannon and Timothy Olyphant.

The New Regency project will see Russell direct from his own script, his first time in the director’s seat since 2015’s Joy, starring Jennifer Lawrence. Russell is producing with Matthew Budman.

Taylor Swift Breaks Modern-Era Record for Biggest Vinyl Album Sales Week

Taylor Swift

Billboard:

In just three days, Taylor Swift’s Evermore has set the record for the biggest sales week for a vinyl album in the U.S. since MRC Data began tracking sales in 1991.

The vinyl edition of Evermore, released on May 28, sold over 40,000 copies in the U.S. through May 30, according to initial reports to MRC Data. That beats the record for an entire single-week of vinyl sales, held by the debut frame of vinyl devotee Jack White’s Lazaretto, when it launched with 40,000 copies in the week ending June 15, 2014. (MRC Data began electronically tracking music sales in 1991, when the company was known as SoundScan.) It’s presumed that Evermore’s vinyl sales sum will grow by the end of the tracking week on Thursday, June 3.

Non-Fungible Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift

Ben Thompson, writing for Stratechery:

This is the inverse of Swift leveraging her fans to acquire her masters: future artists will wield that power from the beginning (like sovereign writers). It’s not that “art is important and rare”, and thus valuable, but rather that the artists themselves are important and rare, and impute value on whatever they wish.

To put it another way, while we used to pay for plastic discs and thought we were paying for songs (or newspapers/writing or cable/TV stars), empowering distribution over creators, today we pay with both money and attention according to the direction of creators, giving them power over everyone. If the creator decides that their NFTs are important, they will have value; if they decide their show is worthless, it will not. And, in the case of Swift, if she decides that albums are valuable they will be, not because they are now scarce, but because only she can declare an album “Taylor’s Version”.

I found this article interesting. I’m not sure how much of it I agree with, and how much seems to be reaching to draw connections between unrelated things, but it did make me think.

Taylor Swift Dominates the Charts

Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift once again has the number one album in the country:

More than 12 years after Taylor Swift notched her first No. 1 album on the Billboard 200 chart in 2008 with her second studio set Fearless, she’s back atop the list with a re-recorded version of the album, titled Fearless (Taylor’s Version). The new set is her ninth No. 1 and scores the biggest week of 2021 for any album. It launches with 291,000 equivalent album units earned in the U.S. in the week ending April 15, according to MRC Data.

We Were Both Young When I First Saw You: A Closer Look at ‘Fearless (Taylor’s Version)’

Can a re-recorded version of a beloved album recapture the magic of the original? Taylor Swift is betting on the answer being “Yes” as she embarks on a journey to remake her first six albums. First up? 2008’s Fearless, the breakthrough LP that netted Taylor some of her biggest hits, won her a Grammy trophy for Album of the Year (the first of three, so far), and made her a generational pop music superstar.

Chorus.fm contributors Craig Manning, Anna Acosta, and Garrett Lemons took a closer look at the project, revisiting the original Fearless and exploring the various ways that the new Fearless (Taylor’s Version) stacks up.

Read More “We Were Both Young When I First Saw You: A Closer Look at ‘Fearless (Taylor’s Version)’”