“The rumors are terrible and cruel. But honey, most of them are true.” – “New Romantics”, Taylor Swift
Taylor Swift’s reputation has proven to be her most polarizing album yet. Pundits, critics, and fans were immediately divided in their opinions of the new music. Now, six months since its release, they have also come to varying conclusions about the album’s commercial success.
Why Reputation Was a Success
Reputation’s total sales thus far are huge by any measure. While some may point out that this was the first album where she failed to surpass her previous album’s opening week sales, it’s useful to have some perspective on how big this number was:
1. The Consistently Massive Opening Week Sales
Source: Billboard
With reputation, Swift became the first artist (male or female) to debut four albums with first-week sales of 1 million units – not to mention she accomplished this with four consecutive releases. Swift’s sustained and enormous success is a rarity in an ever-changing music world, where pop stars’ popularity can fall as dramatically as they can rise.
Using Billboard 200’s multi-metric consumption methodology (which factors in album sales, track downloads and streaming), reputation had the biggest week of any album in 2017, more than doubling Kendrick Lamar’s impressive first-week tally of 603,000 units (353,000 from “pure sales”).
All in all, reputation had the 10th biggest debut album sales week of all-time.
2. The Biggest Album of 2017 (?)
Within just six weeks of its release, reputation had the most pure sales of any album of 2017, marking the third year she had laid claim to that title. It wasn’t even close – she nearly outsold the next biggest albums – Ed Sheeran’s Divide and Lamar’s DAMN. – combined. It marked the third time that Swift had achieved the feat, after Fearless in 2008 and 1989 in 2014.
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- Source: Nielsen Music, for the tracking period Dec. 30, 2016 through Dec. 28, 2017.
- https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/chart-beat/8085932/ed-sheeran-divide-nielsen-music-top-album-2017
While Divide and DAMN. logged more total album units in 2017, an enormous number of those came solely from just a few huge singles. “Shape of You”, the top-selling song of last year and the most streamed song of all time, distorts our view of Divide’s impact as a full album. We would venture to guess that more Americans listened to reputation in its entirety than Divide and maybe even more than DAMN.
3. The Ability to Withstand Industry Trends
Reputation’s sales stats become even more remarkable when you consider the climate in which Swift achieved them. Since the release of 1989, physical album sales and digital downloads have continued to decline dramatically while streaming has soared. From 2014 to 2017, yearly album sales fell by ~34% percent in the U.S. It was no small feat for reputation to nearly equal the first-week sales of 1989 in the face of these radical shifts in music consumption.
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Why reputation Was a Flop
1. The Massive Expectations
A multi-platinum selling album like reputation could only be considered a flop in comparison with an extraordinary success. For Taylor Swift, her previous album was all that and more.
1989 spent 11 weeks atop the Billboard 200 albums chart, and 43 weeks in the top 10. The album brought Swift to a level of stardom that few artists in history have reached, and it still looms large over pop music to this day. 1989 hasn’t left the Billboard 200 since its release, and it will soon be eligible for Diamond certification by the RIAA. It would be just the third Diamond album of the 2010s, following Adele’s 21 and 25.
Swift came into the reputation era with the expectation that the album would equal or surpass these mind-blowing numbers. Billboard reported that Big Machine Label Group projected reputation to sell 2 million units in its first week. When it sold “only” 1.2 million, some cited these projections to argue that the album had underperformed.
2. The Lack of Hit Singles
Taylor has released four singles thus far (five if you count “New Year’s Day”, released exclusively to country radio). With the exception of “Look What You Made Me Do” in its first 3 weeks, none of them have achieved any kind of lasting success on radio, streaming, or downloads. In total, reputation’s singles have collectively only spent 9 weeks in the Top 10, her lowest tally since the Speak Now era (2010-2011).
Source: http://daynebatten.com/2015/12/billboard-hot-100-archive/
As a lead single, “Look What You Made Me Do” generated enormous buzz- but also drew serious backlash. Casual listeners took Swift at her word when she declared “the old Taylor”- the cheerful, gracious author of classic love songs-was dead. When she released more melodic and sentimental songs like the ones these listeners were accustomed to, they had perhaps tuned her out completely.
Many in the media lambasted “Look What You Made Me Do” for reviving a years-old celebrity feud, and deemed Swift to be out of touch with the cataclysmic political changes that America had undergone since the release of her last album. Swift had to know the promotional campaign for reputation would have critics, but one has to wonder if she overestimated the level of public interest in the drama of her personal life. Would reputation be charting higher today if she had chosen a different lead single? We will never know, but it is certainly possible.
Swift clearly didn’t try to promote this album as much as her past efforts. She has made an intentional decision to step away from the limelight during this release cycle, and let her music speak for itself. While Swift previously promoted new music with a full slate of talk show appearances and performances, this time she has been virtually hidden from public view post-album-launch, with the exception of a few non-televised holiday performances and occasional social media posts. The more muted commercial success of her latest effort was at least partly driven by Swift’s own marketing decisions.
3. Limited Streaming Success
While streaming platforms have elevated hip-hop to new heights, it’s been hit-or-miss for pop artists. Swift, on her part, has been reluctant to embrace streaming. For reputation’s launch, she elected to withhold the album from all streaming services for its first 3 weeks, which seemed to bolster her album sales. But on the flip side, with a smaller base of streamers, she has had difficulty sustaining reputation’s position on the charts, a stark contrast with Divide and other albums that stay in the top 10 thanks to fans who stream their music every week.
Given that streaming is increasingly becoming the way that people are listening to music, it remains to be seen whether this may hurt her in the long run. Swift’s strategy this time around arguably made economic sense, but as streaming becomes the primary driver of music trends (and their media coverage), she will have to find ways to attract more listeners on streaming platforms to keep her albums relevant for a full cycle.
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“It was a few years later, I showed up here
And they still tell the legend of how you disappeared,
How you took the money and your dignity, and got the hell out
They say you bought a bunch of land somewhere,
Chose the rose garden over Madison Square,
And it took some time, but I understand it now.”– “The Lucky One”, Taylor Swift
It’s useful to have some perspective in assessing reputation’s commercial reception. Fans, industry insiders, and media outlets alike had enormous expectations for reputation to equal or exceed the success of 1989. It’s hard to see how selling over 2 million copies (and counting) of an album could be considered a flop, but you can “call it what you want.”
The more interesting question is where she goes from here. Swift ascended to the highest echelon of pop superstardom with 1989, but at the cost of intense media scrutiny of her every move. With reputation, Swift took a less media-intensive approach to the album’s release, opting to let her music speak for itself and engage with existing fans instead of actively trying to win over new ones. For her next release, one wonders whether widespread commercial success will remain a primary objective.
But reputation still might surprise us with a bona fide hit. The album’s latest single, “Delicate”, seems to be slowly climbing up the charts. With pristine melodies layered over a driving beat, the song has all the makings of a summer smash. It might be just enough to make casual listeners realize that “the old Taylor” – and her incredible songwriting sensibilities – never left.
Joshua Tree Music 