taylor swift
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Following the release of Taylor Swift‘s vulnerable “Anti-Hero” music video on Friday (Oct. 21), the star received some backlash, with critics accusing her of being “fatphobic” due to a scene in which Swift steps on a scale that reads “fat.”
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However, on Tuesday morning’s (Oct. 25) episode of The View, the hosts took to Swift’s defense, noting that she is expressing her personal experience with body image. “They missed the point,” Sunny Hostin said. “For someone who’s an artist, she gets to have agency over her artistry. She was describing a personal experience, and quite frankly, it’s a personal experience a lot of women experience. I’ve experienced it, and men. You get on the scale and you’re a perfectly normal weight and all you see is fat, all you see is, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m five pounds heavier than I should be.’”
Whoopi Goldberg urged critics to “just let her have her feelings,” and not to watch the video if don’t like it. “Why are you wasting your time on this?” she continued. “You all want to say something about Taylor Swift, leave her a– alone!”
Goldberg concluded by calling out “our society” instead Swift. “You can never be just what you are. Everybody wants you to be something more, be less this, more that, and it’s what people do to each other on social media,” she said.
Swift has previously opened up about personal nature of “Anti-Hero,” calling it “one of my favorite songs I’ve ever written,” as she’s never “delved this far into my insecurities in this detail before.”
“I struggle a lot with the idea that my life has become unmanageably sized,” she continued. “Not to sound too dark, but I just struggle with the idea of not feeling like a person — don’t feel bad for me, you don’t need to. But this song really is a real guided tour through all the things I tend to hate about myself; we all hate things about ourselves.”
Watch The View segment below.
The early numbers are in for Taylor Swift‘s Midnights, and while it was safe to assume her 10th studio album would be a hit, fans might not have predicted just how big it could be.
According to initial reports to Luminate on Monday, the album earned more than 1.2 million equivalent album units in the U.S. in its first three days alone. With that news, Midnights has the biggest week for an album, by units, since Swift’s own reputation in 2017 and is already the year’s top-selling album, year to date.
On the new Billboard Pop Shop Podcast, Katie & Keith discuss all the circumstances that allowed Swift to reach that elusive million mark again, from the curiosity surrounding the album and the awareness campaign that included a prominent Thursday Night Football teaser to the positive word-of-mouth from early listeners and dozens of collectible (and clock-building) variations.
Listen below to hear all about it:
Also on the show, we’ve got chart news on how Sam Smith and Kim Petras hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 songs chart with “Unholy” — the first chart-topper for both acts — and how Lil Baby captures his third No. 1 album on the Billboard 200 with “It’s Only Me.” Plus, listen to the show for even more early numbers from Swift’s blockbuster album-release week.
The Billboard Pop Shop Podcast is your one-stop shop for all things pop on Billboard‘s weekly charts. You can always count on a lively discussion about the latest pop news, fun chart stats and stories, new music, and guest interviews with music stars and folks from the world of pop. Casual pop fans and chart junkies can hear Billboard‘s executive digital director, West Coast, Katie Atkinson and Billboard‘s senior director of charts Keith Caulfield every week on the podcast, which can be streamed on Billboard.com or downloaded in Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast provider. (Click here to listen to the previous edition of the show on Billboard.com.)
Taylor Swift had yet another gift for fans at the stroke of midnight on Tuesday (Oct. 25), unveiling her second Midnights music video, this time for the shimmering “Bejeweled.”
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The Cinderella-inspired clip stars Swift in the familiar lead role, though it’s her bejeweled outfits, not a glass slipper, that catches everyone’s attention.
TayTay herself wrote and directed the music video. Keep an eye out for “Prince” Jack Antonoff and cameos from Laura Dern, the Haim sisters and Dita Von Teese, who encourages the pop superstar to slip into a giant cocktail glass. Stay watching for some fiery dragon-action at the close.
Earlier in the day, the pop superstar took to Instagram to announce the video’s release.
“Midnight, what a storied and fabled hour… On this sparkling evening I’ll be releasing my twist on a fairytale we all know. The one about the girl and her step sisters and the clock striking 12…” she captioned a photo of herself as Cinderella, sitting in a dark room wearing a worn down dress while sewing a glittery, midnight blue gown. “This video is wild, whimsical and created SPECIFICALLY for you, my beloved fans who have paved this shimmering path. Look out for some dazzling cameos! Join us later for a very Bejeweled premiere [diamond emoji].”
Midnights is already a global hit. The album set a new 24-hour streaming record on Spotify, and is expected to dominate sales charts around the world.
Watch the “Bejeweled” music video below.
Taylor Swift is continuing her rollout of the highly anticipated Midnights visuals, and the star took to social media on Monday (Oct. 24) that the next music video, this time for the track “Bejeweled,” will be arriving at the stroke of midnight.
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“Midnight, what a storied and fabled hour… On this sparkling evening I’ll be releasing my twist on a fairytale we all know. The one about the girl and her step sisters and the clock striking 12…” she captioned a photo of herself as Cinderella, sitting in a dark room wearing a worn down dress while sewing a glittery, midnight blue gown. “This video is wild, whimsical and created SPECIFICALLY for you, my beloved fans who have paved this shimmering path. Look out for some dazzling cameos! Join us later for a very Bejeweled premiere [diamond emoji].”
The “Bejeweled” video comes just days after Swift dropped her Midnights album in full, an extra seven songs as part of the album’s 3am Edition and the music video for “Anti-Hero.” The dramatic features Swift attending her own funeral, doing shots and drinking wine straight from the bottle with her party hard doppelgänger and blowing up to 50-foot giant for an Alice in Wonderland-style dinner party crash.
According to initial reports to Luminate, Midnights, which was released on Oct. 21, has sold more than 800,000 copies in the U.S. through its first day across all available formats (multiple digital album download, CD, vinyl and cassette variants). It has already logged the largest sales week for any album since 2017, is the top-selling album of 2022 year-to-date, and has set a modern-era record for single-week vinyl album sales.
Taylor Swift has been a regular fixture at the top of the Billboard 200 since 2008, when she notched her first No. 1 album with Fearless. Since then, she’s continued to break records, rack up No. 1s — 10 so far — and score eye-popping first-week unit totals.
While it’s difficult to compare debut-week performances of any single artist’s albums over time — owed to changes in market conditions and music consumption patterns — it’s enlightening to take a look back at Swift’s last five charted releases, from 2019’s Lover through 2021’s Red [Taylor’s Version], and at what fueled their debuts on the Billboard 200 albums chart.
The marketing and promotion techniques applied to those five releases likely informed the rollout plan of Swift’s 10th studio album, Midnights, which arrived Friday (Oct. 21). It bowed on streaming services and via retailers in a plethora of options: as a digital album download, multiple CD and vinyl LP variants and a cassette tape.
Midnights is Swift’s first studio album since Evermore, in 2020. Since then, she released two re-recorded albums, Fearless (Taylor’s Version) and Red (Taylor’s Version), both in 2021. Five months prior Evermore, she released its sister project, Folklore, and in 2019, Lover.
Midnights arrives after months of pre-release promotion and pre-orders — but no music from the 13-track album was released until the album dropped in full. The set’s “Anti-Hero” garnered an official music video on Oct. 21 and is being promoted as its lead radio single. The album is available to purchase in a standard digital album (both clean and explicit), an iTunes-exclusive version with a bonus track (clean and explicit), four standard CD editions (each with a different cover, both clean and explicit), four vinyl LP editions (each with a different cover and colored vinyl) and a cassette tape.
Target also sold an exclusive “Lavender” edition of the album on CD and colored-vinyl LP, with the CD boasting three bonus tracks.
In addition, in the weeks leading up to release, Swift’s webstore sold pre-orders of signed copies of the four standard CD albums and the four standard vinyl LPs. Midnights was also available in deluxe boxed set with a CD edition of the album and a Swift-branded T-shirt, exclusively for Capital One cardholders.
Three hours after Midnights arrived, Swift issued a deluxe edition of the album with seven bonus songs (20 tracks total) to streaming services and digital retailers (with the latter including a digital liner notes booklet).
What else might Swift have up her sleeve during release week? As with most things in Swiftworld — only she knows for sure until it’s announced. What we do know — thanks to her sharing via social media – is that she’s slated to make an appearance on NBC’s The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on Monday (Oct. 24) and a second music video from the album will arrive on Tuesday (Oct. 25). Her social media calendar has also teased possible promotions or activations with Target on Saturday (Oct. 22) and independent record stores on Sunday.
Here’s a recap of the debut-week performances of Swift’s last five albums before Midnights and some of the marketing and promotional activations that fueled their arrivals on the chart.
Taylor Swift‘s Midnights has been out for less than 24 hours, and it has already broken a major record.
Spotify announced on Friday (Oct. 21) that Swift’s 10th studio LP is officially the most-streamed album in a single day in Spotify history. The “Lavender Haze” singer re-shared the news, writing, “How did I get this lucky, having you guys out here doing something this mind blowing?! Like what even just happened??!?!”
Swift’s 13-track album was accompanied by a 3am Edition that was released just a few hours later, making a total of 20 songs.
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“We lie awake in love and fear, in turmoil and in tears,” she wrote about the record in two paragraphs displayed across a promotional photo posted to social media. “We stare at walls and drink until they speak back. We twist in our self-made cages and pray that we aren’t – right this minute – about to make some fateful life-altering mistake.”
“This is a collection of music written in the middle of the night, a journey through terrors and sweet dreams,” she continued. “The floors we pace and the demons we face. For all of us who have tossed and turned and decided to keep the lanterns lit and go searching – hoping that just maybe, when the clock strikes twelve… we’ll meet ourselves.”
Swifties can tune into NBC on Monday for Swift’s previously confirmed appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. Then on Tuesday, Oct. 25, a second, unnamed Midnights music video will drop. And next Friday, Oct. 28, Swift will stop by the BBC for The Graham Norton Show in the U.K.
Taylor Swift‘s Midnights arrived at last on Friday (Oct. 21), and fans know that the pop superstar is not afraid of some subtle, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shade in her music.
The 13 tracks of the singer’s 10th studio album tell “the stories of 13 sleepless nights scattered throughout my life,” according to Swift, which immediately had fans analyzing the lyrics to figure out what (and who) keeps Taylor up at night.
And while some of the swoon-worthy love songs like “Lavender Haze” and “Sweet Nothing” are clearly about her boyfriend Joe Alwyn, who wrote the latter with her, many of the songs are less obvious. As a result, Swifties flooded Twitter with their thoughts.
See below for some of the most popular unconfirmed fan theories about which celebrities Swift is calling out on Midnights, from John Mayer to Kanye West.
Taylor Swift finally unveiled her Midnights album on Friday (Oct. 21), and to celebrate, Sportsnet anchor Faizal Khamisa challenged himself to reference all 13 tracks of the original album while running through his sports broadcast.
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“Alex Bregman was once baseball’s ‘Anti-Hero,’ but now he’s just plain hero for Houston,” he says at one point, before calling a heated hockey fight some “Vigilante S—.” He flawlessly incorporated all tracks into the broadcast, checking off each song as he went along.
While the broadcast featured the 13 tracks that dropped at midnight, Swift promised a “special very chaotic surprise” in the wee hours following the album’s release, and she didn’t disappoint, dropping a trove of seven extra Midnights tracks.
“Surprise!” she wrote on social media. “I think of Midnights as a complete concept album, with those 13 songs forming a full picture of the intensities of that mystifying, mad hour. However! There were other songs we wrote on our journey to find that magic 13.”
The fuller, 20-track version of Midnights is titled Midnights (3am Edition), and includes the previously unannounced songs “The Great War,” “Bigger Than the Whole Sky,” “Paris,” “High Infidelity,” “Glitch,” “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve.”
After a weekend of soaking up those 20 new tunes, Swifties can tune into NBC on Monday for Swift’s previously confirmed appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. Then on Tuesday, Oct. 25, a second, unnamed Midnights music video will drop. And next Friday, Oct. 28, Swift will stop by the BBC for The Graham Norton Show in the U.K.
Just like clockwork, Taylor Swift’s highly anticipated 10th studio album has arrived.
Swifties have been eagerly awaiting its release since the pop superstar broke the news during her video of the year acceptance speech at the 2022 VMAs. “I thought it might be a fun moment to tell you that my brand-new album comes out Oct. 21,” she coyly revealed. “And I will tell you more at midnight.”
And tell us more, she did. Aptly titled Midnights, she explained that the album would tell “the stories of 13 sleepless nights scattered throughout my life” — inviting fans all along “a journey through terrors and sweet dreams.”
In the wee hours of the night, three hours after the album’s initial release at midnight ET sharp on Oct. 21, the 13-track project became a 20-track one. The singer-songwriter surprise dropped the “3 am Edition,” which contains seven additional new songs.
To celebrate her newest full-length set, Billboard dug through Swift’s hefty catalog to find every mention of “midnight” in a song. Night in general has been a recurring theme in her music for over a decade, yet we were surprised to find that that exact word only appears in 10 out of 200+ songs (and four being from Midnights alone). So we decided to take things a step further and also count the times she sings “middle of the night” as honorable mentions — because take away a few letters and it’s the same darn thing (and before you @ us, no, we are not listing her specific mid-night mentions of 1:58 a.m., 2 a.m., 2:30 a.m., 3 a.m. and so forth).
Without further ado, from Fearless to Evermore to Midnights, here are all of Swift’s “midnight” and “middle of the night” lyrics, listed chronologically (with “middle of the night” lyrics beginning at No. 11).
Taylor Swift gets vulnerable about some of her insecurities in the video for “Anti-Hero” from her new Midnights album. But now she wants Swifties to do the same. In conjunction with the album’s release, Swift joined YouTube Shorts to launch the #TSAntiHeroChallenge on Friday morning (Oct. 21), inviting her fans to “share their anti-heroic traits” to the strains of the pop tune about looking in the mirror and seeing the real you.
“The #TSAntiHeroChallenge is all about acknowledging and celebrating the traits that make each of us truly unique and showcasing one’s true self in a FUN way,” reads a prompt for the viral challenge.” An anti-heroic trait could be as simple as always grabbing the last slice of pizza, clapping at the end of movies, always putting your feet on the car dashboard, using the same word to start your daily Wordle, leaving your clean laundry in the basket until the next time you do it, pretending you didn’t already watch the next episode of the series you watch with your pals, or even treating your cat like a human. Anything goes!”
The rules are pretty simple: watch the “Anti-Hero” video — written and directed by Swift and featuring some classic comedic cameos — then think about which anti-heroic traits you have, go to YouTube Shorts, create a short, add sound from “Anti-Hero,” then the #TSAntiHeroChallenge tag and publish.
Taylor primed the pump with a pair of Shorts video, including one in which she pokes fun at her anti-social, cat mom tendencies.
Check out the shorts below.