Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish & The Album Variant Drama

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There was a bit of drama earlier this year, supposedly between Billie Eilish and Taylor Swift. It didn’t really seem to be between them, but between their fanbases. But it now seems to be escalating, with a lot of a fans theorizing that they have an issue with each other. And they could be onto something, because the other day, Billie’s manager Danny was liking hate tweets about Taylor, accusing her of not letting other artists like Billie Eilish, SZA, and Olivia Rodrigo shine.

Back in April, Billie did an interview with Billboard criticizing the trend of releasing albums with a ton of variants. She said, “We live in this day and age where for some reason, it’s very important to some artists to make all sorts of different vinyls and packaging, which ups the sales and ups the numbers and gets them more money… It’s some of the biggest artists in the world making 40 different vinyl packages that have a different unique thing just to get you to keep buying more … It’s irritating to me that we’re still at a point where you care that much about your numbers and you care that much about making money”.

After this quote was publicized, people immediately began drawing the connection to Taylor, which makes sense. She’s gained attention for doing this exact thing, releasing a ton of different album variants with a slightly different tracklist, and has received criticism about it for years. She’s been called a “capitalist queen” by Swifties, in a sort-of self-aware way, but she has also gained criticism from the general public, and a lot of her own fans, with people saying it comes across as money-hungry and wasteful.

The exact points that Billie raises about lack of sustainability and caring too much about numbers, are views that have been continually expressed about Taylor over the years, even from Swifties. So people making the connection totally makes sense.

Billie responded and said “I wasn’t singling anyone out, these are industry-wide systemic issues”. And Billie acknowledges that she also releases multiple album variants and centers her issues with this around environmentalism. But, the sustainability argument is far from the only issue people have with this.

I’ve seen a lot more criticism towards album variants in the last couple of years than I did before that, and this raises the question, is mounting criticism of album variants coming. There are a variety of things that artists can do that are considered harmful to their career, like staying silent on major political issues, and I think if people get vocal enough about this, eventually the trend of multiple album variants could also become so controversial that artists avoid it.

Since Taylor Swift is culturally the face of this, I want to explore her history of it, why I think it has gotten out of hand, and why the supposed beef between her and Billie has resurfaced in the last few days. Firstly, releasing different album variants obviously isn’t new. Pop artists particularly have always released albums, deluxe editions, country-exclusive editions and so on. But the volume does seem to have increased. Taking Taylor as an example, when you look at the variants of albums like 1989 and reputation, Taylor only released a few options, mainly just changing the colour of the vinyl. 1989 had a deluxe edition with a bonus three tracks, and reputation had no deluxe at all.

Fast-forward to 2020 that’s when things really started to change for Taylor. When she announced her indie-folk album folklore, she revealed that there were 8 different versions of the album, with different covers and differently colored vinyls. And there were a few people criticising this at the time on social media, but generally people didn’t have an issue with it. Me personally, I didn’t either. I think giving fans an option of cover and color if they want to buy an album physically is cool.