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Taylor Swift is a busy woman. The pop star is currently in the middle of her Reputation Stadium Tour—she named it that lest you forget how famous she is—performing to tens of thousands of fans a night. Several shows have broken attendance records, and last week, Swift topped Billboard’s Hot Tours ranking by playing three shows at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium and one night at Cleveland’s FirstEnergy Stadium, all sellouts. Swift performed to a combined 216,977 fans across the four gigs and raked in $27,180,143, according to Billboard.
All of those figures can only mean one thing: I was wrong.
Seven months ago, I wrote an opinion piece titled “Taylor Swift Is No Longer Relatable, And Her Ticket Sales Prove It,” in which I cited slow initial ticket sales as evidence that fans no longer connected with Swift as strongly as they used to. I balked at Swift’s steeper-than-ever ticket prices, and I criticized Ticketmaster’s dubious “Taylor Swift Tix” program that encouraged fans to buy Reputation multiple times in order to get further ahead in the ticketing queue. Mostly, I argued that Reputation is a boring, solipsistic album that consummates Swift’s transformation from plucky girl next door to self-obsessed superstar—a transformation that fans deemed unworthy of seeing in a live setting.
I stand by my criticism of Reputation. I still think it’s an overproduced mess, and it’s no coincidence that it’s the lowest-selling album of her career by a long shot. It’s only yielded two Billboard Hot 100 Top 10 hits so far—including the polarizing, chart-topping comeback single, “Look What You Made Me Do”—a far cry from 1989’s five Top 10 hits (including three No. 1’s: “Shake it Off,” “Blank Space” and “Bad Blood”). When music magazines publish their official rankings of Swift’s discography in 20 years, I’m fairly confident Reputation won’t top any of their lists.
Yet despite the relative commercial decline of Reputation, it’s still a massive success, and to say otherwise would be foolish. The album sold 1.2 million units in its first week, a number that hasn’t been topped by any subsequent release over the past nine months. It’s one of two albums to move a million units in 2017 (along with Ed Sheeran’s Divide), and it became first album to surpass 2 million units since Adele’s 25 crossed the milestone in 2015. Reputation recently received a 3x platinum certification from the RIAA, and “Look What You Made Me Do” went 4x platinum. Nobody holds a candle to Swift in terms of pure album sales right now, and barring a surprise Adele album, that’s not likely to change any time soon.
RIAA certifications aside, there’s a more direct way to measure Reputation’s impact: box office receipts. The Reputation Stadium Tour has grossed well over $100 million in North America alone , and it’s still got two months to go (along with a handful of Australian and Japanese dates to round out the year). The trek has earned rave reviews and probably registers as the single greatest moment in tens of thousands of fans’ lives. No amount of cheap ticketing gimmicks or laughably overwrought music videos can invalidate that.
Was my initial assessment of Swift’s commercial prospects sincere? Yes. Did it ultimately prove to be wrong? Apparently so. People are entitled to their opinions, but to stick by those opinions even when cold, hard facts invalidate them is textbook ignorance. I still don’t find Taylor Swift relatable, and that’s fine. She doesn’t make music for me. She makes music for the millions of fans who faithfully show up to every tour date, buy a dozen copies of her albums and then still stream them afterward, just so she can enjoy a double sales boost.
I previously argued that Swift’s sky-high ticket prices showed an abandonment of the virtues that won her millions of fans in the first place. It’s not up to me to say whether those fans are getting what they deserve on the Reputation Stadium Tour. But they sure do seem to be getting exactly what they want.
