lemonysnicket

The point is that songs that are produced using software kits are allowed to chart.

Any reply that does not place Taylor Swift at #1 is absolutely delusional. Taylor has revolutionized the importance of songwriting in mainstream music. No one cared about songwriting credits before Taylor exploded...it was not shameful for it to be known you to have your songs written for you. Due to Taylor, everyone wants to have songwriting credits now, everyone wants to be seen as a songwriter. Taylor has the most ambitious mainstream saga in recent memory with the re-recordings project. It has upended the industry in numerous ways. The (X's Version) moniker is more culturally permeating than some other huge artists' whole legacies. The entire industry now is modeled after Taylor. It's a Taylor Swift world, not a Beyonce world. Every breakout artist has some element of confessional, diaristic, singer-songwriter pop, every album rollout takes its cues from Taylor's rollouts, whatever controversial commercial strategies Taylor does become the norm 2 years later. The trashy party pop of Gaga and Katy and Britney, the "legendary performer" persona of Michael and Beyonce, the "larger than life" vocalists in Whitney or Celine....that musical landscape has been very much upended by the Swiftian genre.

Beyonce and not Taylor Swift? LOL

Why shouldn't they allow AI songs to chart? If it's a song that's being listened to than it should chart. The charts should reflect popularity not your personal morals. AI music is just another step towards full automatization. Musical instruments aren't played anymore anyway, they're programmed in a software package and the producer clicks a few buttons to stitch them together, quite a far cry from the "pure" music of the 80s. Is it lazy? Uncreative? Meaningless? Soulless? Devoid of personality and an affront to human imagination? Sure....but is it being listened to by real people? Yes it is.

The left continues to show they are just as deranged as the right.

I can never and will never care what those shouting about "variants" say until they can show me a breakdown of how many copies were sold to each person. Because those acting like 30 available variants = only 100k unique buyers are living in an alternate reality. I personally suspect the number is closer to 2 million unique buyers.

Of course. This isn't a rag on 25 at all!

starting week 6 the sales for this album really start to plummet. i can see showgirl potentially being higher than 25 on their respective 8th and 9th weeks. And certainly forever after that.

those.....aren't real CD variants.

showgirl won't be able to beat adele's first month, despite having a monstrous debut. nor will it beat it's first 3 months. it's first 6 months? hmm, it could get close...but probably not. it's first year? hmm, now it probably will. it's first 5 years? okay, now showgirl will almost certainly have outsold 25's 15 year total. that's how the streaming era typically works.

To explain what happened for people who don't understand. Republic slow rolled the fulfillment of physical on tortured poets to get more weeks at number 1. Here they did the opposite… they pushed everything into week 1 to break Adele's record.

No wonder they were pushing those variants so hard. 4.0 million is a lot prettier than 3.95 million. Wow, what an incredible record. Love how the actual industry is in total awe, while forum users with no knowledge of the music biz have the gall to downplay this feat. The ignorant sure scream the loudest.

obviously. music critics are irrelevant in the modern day. that isn't to say musical criticism is irrelevant....but magazines certainly are. it's remarkable how much more you'll get out of an in-depth 2 hour analysis of an album by a fan on youtube than you would by reading a buzzy article from paste or pitchfork. the difference between them is clear: one cares deeply about the artist, their lore, their musical context, and what they are trying to say, while the other aims to give a shallow rhetorical hit piece. critic reviews are obsolete. they had lots of influence once, funny enough.

Just to clarify some things. Spotify's autoplay feature is a natural part of their platform, meaning anybody can receive it for free. They just need a track that's sticky and tests well in the algorithm. You can buy autoplay in exchange for lower royalties (Discovery Mode), but A) this does not guarantee your track will stick in the algorithm, (if it doesn't stick the algorithm will start to drop the track) and B) Discovery Mode is meant to break small artists, who have songs in the 1-50 million streams range. Discovery mode is an exposure tool, and useless for big artists to pay for...because they already have all that exposure for free! If Taylor's song is sticky (tests well with the audience) and the algorithm likes it (it already has a popularity score of 96! that's a good sign) then Ophelia will receive autoplay and spotify radio naturally. As far as we understand (the details aren't fully disclosed, this is all third party data) spotify's algorithm doesn't start to push songs until days 7-10....once its built up enough data to know if a track is "safe" to push to wider audience. So, hopefully Ophelia receives an autoplay expansion in the upcoming days. It also seems that the algo is flatter, broader, and a lot more hesitant now...preferring to push tried and true hits with low skip rates and high audience familiarity, rather than rocket up every new song (as was the case in 2024). With that being said, there are several knobs labels can turn to drive autoplay and other forms of passive streams. One is radio (yes, Spotify's algorithm directly tracks what's playing on radio stations!). Spotify also tracks Shazam (Ophelia going #1 is good.) They can push playlisting, slot order (slots 1-5 on big playlists are an autoplay magnet). They can also play with these figures across different territories and see where the track responds the best. So far, Republic has handed everything to Ophelia on a silver platter....all the song has to do now is resonate with the audience. As for the billboard rule...they do only allow 4 sales of a physical album product to count per per customer...but each variant counts as its own unique product, since each variant has a unique UPC. So someone buying 4 copies each of 10 different variants will count as 40 sales. They only count as the same "album" on the chart because Billboard classifies an album based on its audio content, not its physical packaging. It's a weird distinction that let's these loopholes work.

https://www.submithub.com/popularity-checker

that's about the same as fortnight. we'll need to see how it tests on autoplay and spot radio before saying anything conclusively about its chart run though. its popularity score (96) is a pretty good sign.

oof....that drop for ophelia is...not pretty. don't think this will be a birds type hit.

because we already have a chart for that: the albums chart. before streaming, all listens of an album could not be tracked, and thus there were no album bombs. the hot 100 is for singles. they should implement this rule. or....limit it, like the UK did. it becomes redundant.

The people on this forum are so out of touch with reality. do you get upset that stores sell sweatshirts in various colors? are they fraudulent for doing so? greedy? are you mad that harry potter has over 200 variant editions? do you question its status as the biggest book series of all time, or its sales? "Surely, if The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde had the same number of variants as Harry Potter, it would have sold as many copies! Jasper Fforde just isn't desperate!!" is how this forum seems to think the world operates. The reality is the direct inverse: the more demand you have, the more product you are able sell. The music industry is a business that follows any other business model. Taylor Swift is signed to a major label. They are not a non profit, they are a business firm. And Taylor Swift has a lot of agency, but.....if she goes to Monte Lipman and tells him she wants one variant of her new album, he'll shut her down and tell her no, she needs to have several variants, because part of Taylor Swift's job as a record-signed artist is to....sell records. It's the whole point of her being on the roster, it's part of her contract, and it's.....also the personal aspiration of every single artist. She isn't being "greedy" by having multiple variants....she isn't even necessarily designing these variants herself or choosing when they release. None of your favorite artists do. It's strange that people think Taylor (or any mainstream act) personally decides to make a new variant on a whim and then upload it to iTunes bc she is "desperate for sales". 13 management (unique to Taylor) is only responsible for artwork and branding: all logistics, and negotiations with distributors, streaming services, legal teams and promotional partners are handled by Republic and planned well in advance. It is a coordinated effort across several teams. Did you know Taylor doesn't....choose her album release date, either? People ascribe bitterness to her specifically, as if she sits alone in her house maliciously plotting these "greedy, capitalistic" album releases from start to end all by herself, when these rollouts are orchestrated and streamlined by hundreds of people. It displays yet another level of being out of touch with reality. And some suggest that selling variants isn't "organic", because it's just a small core of people buying the same album 30 times. Just as with Harry Potter, or Marvel, or any other blockbuster entertainment brand, there is an enormous demand peak for Taylor's music. There are people who will buy all 20 of Taylor Swift's album, (those people exist for ariana, beyonce, everybody...even doja! you just don't hear about them online because, relative to taylor, they are niche artists with only a fraction of that active base), but they only indicate that the number of casuals buying just one copy is enormously bigger. A demand curve has a very long tail….and the higher the peak, the larger the tail. 'Showgirl' is the music equivalent of 'Endgame', 'Harry Potter', or 'Grand Theft Auto': the height of commercial success in their respective genres, coming along with every bell and whistle that is to be expected with that title. The infrastructure behind pop culture isn't a passion project, it's a systematized commercial engine. To anthropomorphize an album rollout the way people are doing....I can only think it the product of a serious parasocialism with the music industry. The people on this forum are completely out of touch with reality.

2024 was only like that because spotify went bonkers with their autoplay algorithm. They've tuned it down a lot for 2025. No song nowadays has a chance at 2024 numbers.

yes. 25 earned ~$38.9m first week in revenue. poets ~50.0m. showgirl is on track for.... $76-80 million

because guess what..... despite what this site says, selling 8 million units in a year IS indicative of an enormously popular record in the real world. poets expanded her fanbase. people act like reception to an album online = reception of the album amongst the general public, ignoring what the data says. its baffling.

billboard first day pure numbers: tortured poets - 1.4 million showgirl - 2.7 million tortured poets final debut - 2.6 million (+1.2m) showgirl final debut - ???

WHATTT

THIS AINT NO CHICKEN THIS A DAMN GOLDEN GOOSE!!!!