You Wouldn’t Be Here for Someone Else

With her newest album, The Life of a Showgirl, Taylor Swift has the number one song, the number one album, and the number one movie in America. She’s the first artist to achieve this feat; not even Prince’s Purple Rain reached these heights. She’s set to blow past Adele’s first-week sales record of 3 and a half million albums. Swift’s fame and commercial success might make this seem like no big deal—sure, we could all sell 3 million albums if we were that famous—but that gets the causality backward. She only hits marks like these because she treats every release like success has to be earned all over again. As a longtime fan, I often roll my eyes at the stunts she pulls to make sure her fans buy the album: the multiple variants, the exclusive tracks, the carefully timed announcements. But I also buy the album, and so, apparently, do a lot of other people.