Taylor Swift famously sang, “Honey, I rose up from the dead, I do it all the time.” But if her latest business move is any indication, Swift’s resurrection powers aren’t limited to her own reputation.
Swift is in full-blown album-promo mode for “The Life of a Showgirl,” and once again, she’s leading with commerce. Since announcing her new album on August 12, she’s rolled out three limited-edition vinyl variants and three CD variants available for pre-order, each with its own unique cover art, stoking Swiftie excitement for collecting them all.
Swift continued with her carefully calibrated rollout this week, revealing yet another alternate album cover — but this time, the announcement came with an unexpected techie twist. This version of “The Life of a Showgirl” is exclusively available to preorder on iTunes.
Yes, you read that right, and no, you didn’t just travel 20 years back in time. Swift has partnered with the music-downloading app that Apple essentially killed in 2019 amid the rise of streaming.
From then on, the option to download iTunes was removed from software updates, and the existing media library was redistributed across newer apps like Apple Music, Apple Books, and Apple Podcasts. The iTunes store is still technically accessible through Apple Music, but as its own entity, iTunes only exists for Windows and older Macs.
The official iTunes account on X hasn’t made a peep since 2019, the same year Apple announced its symbolic death. And yet, this week, iTunes was resurrected in Swift’s image, posting for the first time in over six years.
“The Life of a showgirl era takes center stage,” the new X post reads. “Pre-order @taylorswift13’s new album on iTunes now and get exclusive content once it drops on October 3rd.”
The X account also changed its profile photo and banner to a photo of Swift. Its bio now reads, “Counting down the days til October 3rd.”
The iTunes-exclusive “The Life of a Showgirl” costs $11.99. In addition to the standard 12-song tracklist, this version includes an extra incentive: a short video titled “A Look Behind the Curtain.”
Representatives for Apple Music and Swift did not return requests for comment from Business Insider about the nature of their partnership.
For a devoted capitalist like Swift, sales will always be better than streams
It’s no mystery why Swift would prefer fans to preorder her new album on iTunes instead of presaving it on Apple Music or another streaming platform like Spotify. An album sale is worth far more than a stream, both in terms of literal money in Swift’s pocket and in terms of Billboard’s chart formula, which counts 1,500 streams as one album sale.
Swift is not anti-streaming, per se, but she has a history of resisting our modern form of music consumption. In 2014, she declined to release her blockbuster pop album “1989” on Spotify, opting instead to pull her entire catalog from the service. She told fans that streaming, while making more types of music accessible to more people, had the less desirable effect of devaluing the songs she “bled into” — the work she spun from her own pain and sweat.
“Music is art, and art is important and rare. Important, rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for,” Swift wrote in an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal. “It’s my opinion that music should not be free, and my prediction is that individual artists and their labels will someday decide what an album’s price point is. I hope they don’t underestimate themselves or undervalue their art.”
Swift said she was concerned for artists of all means, levels, and genres, not just A-listers such as herself — and she didn’t just talk the talk. In 2015, Swift called out Apple’s newly launched platform, Apple Music, for refusing to pay artists during a new user’s free trial. Within 24 hours, Apple caved and changed its policy. Later that year, Swift returned the favor by releasing her “1989” concert film as an Apple Music exclusive.
If Swift’s feet seem planted in a bygone media era — one when we paid for stuff like albums and movies and then actually owned that stuff — it’s not a mark of stubbornness so much as it speaks to her singular brand of influence.
Swift represents the last gasp of traditional commerce
Swift’s commercial power is well-documented, but it’s not just about her ability to sell out stadiums. It’s strong enough to convince companies to re-adopt sales methods, from iTunes downloads to vinyl records, that many would consider outdated or ineffective.
Indeed, Target recently announced that it would open 500 stores at midnight on October 3 to sell physical copies of “The Life of a Showgirl.”
“Midnight openings were a staple of music retail in the glory days of the ’80s, ’90s and early 2000s, when Tower Records still ruled the earth,” Chris Willman wrote for Variety. “In the modern era, such late-night openings are almost unheard of, when fans can easily access the same material digitally in an instant.”
Swift made all her music available to stream in 2017. Her team said the move was intended to “thank her fans,” and in the years since, she has become one of the most-streamed artists in the world. Still, her biggest fans seek more permanent, concrete acts of devotion — no matter how pricey or inconvenient they may be. Last year alone, Swift sold nearly 3 million albums from across her discography on vinyl, the most of any artist.
Leslie Deakin, a Swiftie in her 50s, told me earlier this year that Swift activates her “acquisition drive.” She bought a limited-edition vinyl of Swift’s 2024 album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” and within a matter of months, Deakin’s collection had expanded to include most of Swift’s discography.
Deakin also fondly remembers owning multiple Madonna LPs in the ’90s, but in the modern day, she said nobody can reawaken her childlike fervor — to fangirl, to collect, and most of all, to spend — better than Swift. The difference now is that she has money to funnel into her hobbies.
“Of course, she’s such a good businesswoman that there’s all the different variants that you’ve got to get,” Deakin said. “I completely know what she’s doing, but I’m a willing participant.”
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