The news that Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl has recorded the biggest sales week for any album ever is an astonishing milestone in the annals of e-commerce. Swift’s fame ensured that the album would be a hit no matter what, but moving more than 3.5 million units in seven days required high-pressure sales techniques more common to mattress retailers than musicians. The feat testifies to one of the strangest aspects of modern music: the way that popularity has become part of the performance.To understand what Swift achieved, it’s helpful to understand how Adele set the record Swift just broke. When her album 25 sold 3.38 million copies in 2015, the music industry was a different place than it is today. Spotify had come to America just four years earlier, and it was only beginning to qualitatively and quantitatively erode the value of music.As streaming slowly became the public’s preferred way of listening to records, the medium complicated the traditional definition of success. An album having 100 plays could mean one person played it 100 times, or 100 people played it once. In either case, the artist is making a lot less money than they would from 100 album sales. In late 2014, the music industry started counting album equivalent units, a composite metric that accounts for streaming and sales. The term weights sales—physical and digital—far more heavily than it does streams.Understanding that their business model was under threat, pop music’s titans initially balked at streaming. Swift withheld her catalog from Spotify from 2014 to 2017; Adele released 25 without making it available to stream at all for months. Unlike a lot of young pop stars, Adele had a multigenerational audience that included people who were still in the habit of buying albums. She followed up an inescapable breakout album (2011’s 21) with a monumental single, “Hello,” that sent a typhoon of hype through social media. The strategy worked. She smashed a sales record that ’NSync had set in 2000—which, hauntingly, was the height of the CD-sales era, right before file sharing brought the industry to a low.As streaming then supplanted sales and stars such as Swift hammered out their issues with Spotify, a new playbook was written. Streaming encourages a volume game—the more songs on an album, the more streams it’s likely to notch. Streaming also makes repeat listening more important. Pop was always premised on replay value—but no matter how many times someone spun their CD of Bedtime Stories, Madonna received money only from the initial sale. In monetizing each listen, Spotify gave artists distinct incentives to cultivate fervent fan loyalty.The streaming era coincides with the rise of “stans” for good reason. Listeners can now contribute to their favorite artist’s success by hitting “Play” and never “Pause.” The Billboard charts have accordingly leapt from being an insider-y topic to a subject of mainstream conversation akin to player stats in professional sports. K-pop fandoms circulate guides on how Billboard counts streams. When Cardi B and Nicki Minaj were recently feuding, they and their supporters waged war in part by comparing sales totals. Ed Sheeran has talked openly about thinking of his career in arithmetic terms. To be a fan of pop music already required appreciating a market-minded approach to art, but now it also means participating—simply by listening.[Read: How did Taylor Swift convince the world that she’s relatable?]Swift is the prime predator in this ecosystem. On the same day in 2024 that she released her 16-track album The Tortured Poets Department, she also released a 15-track bonus anthology. The payload of content was embraced by a sprawling fan base that was supercharged with excitement from the Eras Tour (the highest-grossing tour ever), and the album handily broke the record for the most streams in a debut week. But because its consumption skewed so heavily toward on-demand digital listening, it couldn’t beat Adele’s total-units sales record.For The Life of a Showgirl, Swift and her team have taken advantage of an unexpected by-product of streaming: the elevated importance of traditional album sales. Vinyl has boomed in the past decade not because people necessarily want to listen to that format but because it gives listeners a tangible way to display their appreciation. Cassette and CD sales have bounced back a bit for similar reasons. Relatedly, music merchandise—tees and totes—has become a hot status symbol.Showgirl turns an album release into something closer to the McDonald’s Monopoly contest, encouraging repeat purchases. The album exists in more than 30 “variants” so far: different combinations of listening formats, album art, merch, and bonus music. At Target—only at Target—you can buy The Life of a Showgirl: The Crowd Is Your King Edition (Summertime Spritz Pink Shimmer Vinyl), for $34.99. Online, you can order the So Glamorous Cabaret Edition CD featuring a show tunes-y take on the song “Elizabeth Taylor.” Different versions have different hand-signed photos; one edition comes with a cardigan; another has voice notes and a cover that tints the turquoise bathwater of the regular album image into a brownish orange.Variants aren’t a new idea, but the sheer volume in this case appears to be unprecedented, and Swift has marketed them in a brazenly manipulative fashion. In the nearly two months between when the album was announced and when it was released, her website featured a number of mysterious countdown clocks. Invariably, they counted down to the announcement of an album variant—many of which were then available for a limited time only. Countdown clocks and flash sales are common features of online retailers that try to panic consumers into buying things they don’t need, and here Swift was acting in the spirit of Temu.Listeners can, of course, resist these offers. But for many of Swift’s fans, ponying up must feel simultaneously pleasurable and obligatory—just like paying to attend Life of a Showgirl movie screenings that mostly consisted of lyric videos. On social media, some Swifties have been sharing photos of their hauls. It’s not yet clear how many variant editions have been sold, but if even a small percentage of Swift’s enormous fan base picked up more than one copy, she would have added a significant multiplier to her sales total.What does this new record signify? Swift may well be more important today than Adele was a decade ago—but the comparison is apples to oranges because the cultural mainstream has fractured so dramatically since then. Swift is unlike her pop predecessors in the shape of her success: Rather than conquer the world with easy listening for a broad audience of casual listeners, she has inspired an intense, tribal devotion. The release of Showgirl—like those of Swift’s previous four original albums—was preceded by no singles, and you can stream the album for free. The people who are buying it are, plainly, making an investment based on extramusical reasons.Which is not to say the music doesn’t matter; now that the album is out, it’s also breaking streaming records in ways that testify to her talent for making addictive pop. Showgirl is far less dazzling than advertised, but it remains a tight, 12-track album infused with the bubblegum witchcraft of the producers Max Martin and Shellback. A week after I reviewed it, I still feel that it’s her weakest effort to date—she’s previously rendered many of its ideas more cleverly, profoundly, ambitiously. Listening invites far too many thoughts about commerce winning over art.Swift herself certainly seems to be thinking about money more than ever. Perhaps reflecting a cultural vibe shift back toward “greed is good,” Showgirl sees America’s favorite girl next-door flaunt her wealth lyrically, really for the first time. She mentions Gucci clothes, Cartier diamonds, and Parisian hotel stays. At first, “Wi$h Li$t” reads as an anti-materialist love song: Swift doesn’t crave “Balenci shades”; she just wants kids, love, and peace. But the joke implied by its title punctuation is that every dollar she earns is underwriting her own personal quest for happiness. This is Showgirl’s boldest achievement: disguising new bragging rights for a billionaire as a fairy-tale ending, and giving her fans a noble reason to spend.