How Much Taylor Swift Vinyl Do You Really Need?
I preordered "1989 (Taylor's Version)" from Taylor Swift's web store and it was complicated.
As part of ongoing research into the current state of music retail, I decided to pre-order Taylor Swift’s 1989 album remake via her web store. Taylor’s one of the dozens of artists who are bypassing traditional retail and selling directly to their fans.
Things did not go well.
Disclaimer (just in case any Swifties accidentally stumble onto this post): Taylor Swift is not personally responsible for my retail experience. I am not attacking her. This post is about the difficulties that both fans and artists experience when buying and selling music in 2023. If the biggest artist in the world has a store with these kinds of issues, imagine what it’s like for performers who don’t have her power.
Disclaimer Pt. 2: Many music fans in my demographic have never listened to Tay and have decided that she must suck because she’s so incredibly popular and got her start in the pop country swamp. You’re wrong, and some of you would probably be more open to her music if she didn’t happen to be a woman. Here’s a playlist for old rock people: Apple Music, Qobuz, Tidal, Spotify. I stayed away from the arena rockers, the early country jams, and the nakedly ambitious pop hits to concentrate on the ethereal alt-rock tunes that echo Mazzy Star, Joni Mitchell or the Cocteau Twins. I’d also recommend you read some of Rob Sheffield’s writing about her in Rolling Stone if you want to start to understand why she’s so important a musician.
This is not a post about Taylor Swift’s music. It’s about the unsatisfying experience of buying music in 2023, and how much I miss being able to drive down to Tower Records on release day to buy whatever new releases I wanted.
History Lesson
To review: Taylor Swift was originally signed to Big Machine Records but left the label after her 2017 LP Reputation. Two years later, Ithaca Holdings acquired the label for $330 million.
There are a couple of issues here. Ithaca was controlled by music manager Scooter Braun, a person who Swift holds partially responsible for Kanye West’s skeevy music video for “Famous,” a clip designed to humiliate Swift as part of the ongoing feud he started when he grabbed her microphone at the 2012 MTV Music Awards.
This is a complicated story, but the short version is that Taylor Swift says the only way Big Machine’s owners would let her purchase her master recordings was if she re-upped for another six albums. When she refused to sign, they sold the catalog to the one person she least wanted involved in her career.
If you want the long version with all the extra spicy sauce, there are millions of words online and thousands of conspiracy theories about what really happened. Dig in if you want, but 21st-century fan culture is probably too intense for most anyone who’s reading this.
Still, Kanye’s 100% the bad guy here, and his behavior in this situation came at the beginning of his descent into madness. I heard “Through the Wires” in a restaurant the other night, and it bummed me out for a couple of days after. What a tragedy he’s become.
Swift announced that she would embark on a project to re-record every album in the Big Machine catalog and make those new versions available to her fans. I’m sure most industry types took this as a tantrum from a jilted artist and believed that the threat was either an empty on. At best, the suits thought the project would fizzle out after a couple of so-so releases.
Do not underestimate a vengeful Taylor Swift. 1989 is the fourth album in the Taylor’s Version remake series, following her new recordings of Fearless, Red and Speak Now. All four of the remakes have been #1 albums in the U.S. and they now get the lion’s share of the streams on Spotify. Only her debut Taylor Swift and her final Big Machine LP Reputation are left on this project.
Swift has offered almost an additional album’s worth of bonus tracks with each album, including songs that were written during the album’s era. She’s been making these updated albums while maintaining a regular release schedule of wildly popular LPs of new material over the past four years.
Vinyl as signifier
In the old days, music fans usually bought a single of copy of an album and taped it for playback in their car cassette deck. Maybe you bought a CD box set reissue a few years down the line. Of course, there have always been record collectors interested in different pressings, but they were the fringe.
Taylor has helped fuel the vinyl revival and redefine music fandom. There’s a standard version of 1989 (Taylor’s Version) on Crystal Skies blue vinyl, CD and cassette.
Her web store sold three additional LPs in Sunrise Boulevard Yellow, Aquamarine Green, and Rose Garden pink. Each had a different cover and fans could buy a wall film strip display to create a 1-9-8-9 image with all four versions.
There’s also a Target-only LP in Tangerine vinyl that includes “Sweeter Than Fiction,” an extra track that’s currently vinyl-only but will likely migrate to digital once the sales cycle is complete. It’s also a new recording of a previously released song from the soundtrack of the 2013 movie One Chance, a U.K. movie that approximately none of us saw.
There are also four Deluxe CD versions in the four standard colors (blue, yellow, aquamarine, pink) with four different covers. That version includes a version of the album song “Bad Blood” with a verse by Kendrick Lamar.
There are also four Target-only versions of the CD that come with a poster but without the additional track. There’s also a film strip display for the CDs.
Finally, there are two different cassette tapes, each featuring two of the four colors she used for the vinyl. The half shell for Side A is one color and Side B is a different one. I count 5 LP versions, 9 CD versions, and 2 cassette versions for a total of 16 different versions. The rough total for completists is roughly $350. Add in another $100 if you want the LP and CD display shelves.
I can’t really get with this concept. While these multiple versions are obviously selling in enough quantity to make their release profitable, they’re also clogging up the manufacturing pipeline at a time when indie artists are waiting 6 months to get their albums pressed.
Plus, you know, the planet. No one’s going to play all 16 versions of the album if they buy them all, plus manufacturing and shipping them is using up a lot more resources than another t-shirt or hoodie design would.
Hell, I’ve even given up collecting every variant of my beloved Big Star records because I just don’t need yet another 21st-century remaster of music I already own. I just can’t see the benefit in having a dozen versions that I’ll never play.
While the direct-sale model may be working out for some artists, it’s a pain for small record stores who never really know if they’re going to have enough (or any) copies of a new LP on release day. Taylor is one of the few artists with access to enough manufacturing capacity to make sure everyone has copies on that first day, but she’s the exception.
I’d rather buy new releases at the store, but I decided to buy 1989 (Taylor’s Version) from her web store and report what happened. When the first email blast went out, the store insisted that the Sunrise Yellow vinyl would be available for 48 hours only, so I ordered an LP and a regular copy of the CD.
Note: Music sales from Taylor’s web store are managed by her friends at Universal Music and not Taylor’s own organization. This is one of the few places where a major label can still add value to her career, and they need to flawlessly execute this complicated job.
That 48-hours thing was not true. The yellow version of the LP was available off-and-on from her website before shipping day and the yellow one was announced before they let anyone know that the Target version of the LP would feature an exclusive track. Vinyl variants are no longer available to buy direct from her store, but there are plenty of copies available in any color you want from eBay, Discogs, and even Amazon third-party sellers.
UPS notified me that my CD and LP would be shipping separately on the Wednesday before the Friday, October 27 release date and that I should receive them on Friday. The LP shipped but got delayed and finally arrived on Saturday. The CD did not ship on time.
None of this was a real problem for me because I subscribe to multiple music streaming services (Apple Music, Qobuz, Tidal, Spotify) and can listen to new releases at my leisure.
I want to look at this from the perspective of a young Taylor Swift fan who’s living at home with their parents, possibly with a dad who’s annoyed that all his kid talks about is this singer whose music has started to piss him off. That’s the real audience for the web store.
Say you’re a kid with no Spotify account of your own, and the vinyl and CD don’t show up on release day. If your parents let you have your own phone, you’ve got YouTube as a possible fallback, but otherwise you’re out of luck.
My Sunrise Boulevard yellow LP showed up on Saturday, but it had a dinged jacket corner. I was surprised because the cardboard mailers that Universal is using are good ones.
I built my record collection in the used bins of Atlanta and Boston, buying promos with gold stamps and cut corners. As long as the LP itself is pristine and the jacket’s seams aren’t split, I have a pretty high tolerance for less-than-perfect vinyl.
When listening to the vinyl becomes less important than possessing the object, those creases become a major issue. The LP is no longer “investment-grade” (actual words heard from a customer in a real record store in 2022) and records become something more akin to collectible baseball cards than physical media for playing music.
That makes the dings a disaster.
I waited a few days for my CD to ship before I contacted the Taylor Swift web store Universal Music. I was 100% sure the CD was never going to ship, but they insisted that I needed to wait a few days. I didn’t bring up the LP, because it wasn’t bothering me that much.
Once I remembered that I was testing the fan experience, I decided to complain about the dings and asked what could be done about them. The web store requested photos of the damage, and after a few more emails back-and-forth, they shipped me a pristine copy of the LP and told me to keep the damaged copy. That’s the best possible resolution, short of them delivering a perfect copy on release day.
The CD never shipped. After five separate requests, they finally refunded my money on November 25, a full month after the CD was scheduled to leave the warehouse. My UPS app still shows that the CD is preparing to ship.
I realize this may all seem like nitpicking to adults who are used to online commerce and the failings of our retail system, but think about this from the perspective of a kid who’s just getting into music and contemplate what they’re learning about the music business.
There’s a perception that you’re helping the artist when you buy direct from their web store, so a young fan might think they’re doing the right thing by ordering in advance rather than having their parents take them to Target, Walmart, or their local record store on release day.
There’s an implicit promise involved in that transaction. Support the artist by buying online, and you’ll have a better experience when the new LP comes out because your favorite artist cares about their biggest fans.
The vinyl experience wasn’t perfect, but I think my dinged copy of the LP was an outlier. I’ve gotten a lot of vinyl shipped in the mailers that Universal uses and that’s the first damaged title I’ve received. I didn't’t have a serious problem, since I had streaming access to the music on release day and the store eventually sent me a new copy. I’m not sure every kid would have been as persistent as I was, and the replacement required me to keep after the issue until it was solved.
The CD is a different matter entirely. If I’d put my allowance towards buying a CD and I didn’t get a refund for a full month after the item didn’t ship, I’d be crushed.
OK, so maybe I’m one of the only people in America whose CD didn’t ship, and my experience is an extreme outlier. Being an outlier doesn’t make the experience any less disappointing for someone who doesn’t get what they ordered.
Buyers should understand that an artist’s web store can’t operate like Amazon, which takes back everything and ships you another copy right away. Any of us who have sold music on eBay or Discogs can testify that’s there is a tiny sliver of online record buyers who are some of the slimiest people on earth. They make false claims about bad packaging or scratches that didn’t exist when the records were shipped and it’s almost impossible to prove them wrong. There’s a reason web stores don’t take everyone’s word at face value. I sympathize with Universal’s requirement that I jump through hoops and send them photos of the damage to my copy, but it was a huge pain.
What’s the easiest solution? Get a streaming subscription the day before your favorite releases a new album just in case the physical media doesn’t show up. Or do your trading with an independent record store that needs the revenue and give them a hand when a superstar artist puts out a new album.
I’d love a world where artists didn’t release their music in so many configurations, even though I understand that everyone is trying to replace disappearing income streams by maximizing their income from super fans. And some of those super fans like buying the same music in a dozen different packages.
Brief music note (a/k/a I lied about reviewing the music): 1989 is the least interesting of the Taylor’s Version remakes because the music on the original LP is so close to the artist she is today. The new versions mostly just sound like covers instead of the subtle (and not-so-subtle) recreations found on the other three Taylor’s Versions. There aren’t any major revelations among the previously unreleased songs, but it’s hard to imagine other artists throwing away songs as good as “Say Don’t Go,” “Suburban Legends: or “Is It Over Now?”
The eventual remake of her debut Taylor Swift should be interesting since she’ll be revisiting songs she wrote almost two decades ago. I’m also looking forward to see if the Reputation songs sound different now that she’s not so pissed off at her record company.
8-Track of the Day
