OH Taylor. You had my two pre-teen daughters when they first heard Red.
You even got me with 1989. And the whole family were singing along by the time The Tortured Poets Department dropped in our kitchen disco.
Taylor Swift is now selling merch with exorbitant prices for her Life Of A Showgirl album[/caption]
These sweatpants are being sold for £60[/caption]
Meanwhile this phone case costs £35[/caption]
But I think you might just have lost me with Life Of A Showgirl — all 34 versions of the same 12 song-album — and the now exorbitant cost of being a Swiftie.
As a strong, independent woman — a billionaire to boot — who practises what she preaches and doesn’t suffer fools, Taylor Swift has been a great role model.
At the Eras tour last year — the one which boosted the UK economy by a billion pounds — I nearly cried on the train to Wembley as yet another sequin-clad fangirl handed my 12-year-old daughter a friendship bracelet and chatted happily about how fun and relatable their heroine was.
‘This is what being a female is really about,’ I triumphantly crowed to my daughter, as we walked into a stadium mostly filled with happy, smiling women and girls.
Yes, the hoodies were too expensive, as was pretty much everything on the merch store at Wembley.
But that’s to be expected, I told my disappointed daughter — it must cost a lot to put on such an incredible show.
Fast forward just over a year, we saw next-level excitement in our household when Taylor announced Life Of A Showgirl.
Sure, the first play of the 12 songs wasn’t mindblowing. But it was probably a “grower”, I reassured them. And after all, we were listening for free on Spotify.
Racking up
So it felt just about OK to fork out £11 per seat for the cinema-only release of a frankly dull 89-minute behind-the-scenes documentary and album playthrough of Life Of A Showgirl on the opening weekend.
Twenty minutes in, my nine-year-old turned to me with a disappointed look on her glittered-up face, and said: “Is this it? Is it really just her songs in words on the screen and the same music video twice?”
“Yes, and that’s just cost us £33 plus popcorn,” I didn’t say out loud.
Clearly her fans didn’t initially share my doubts. She scored the biggest album opening of all time, selling four million copies in a week and racking up 681million streams.
But, from a pop star who’s supposed to be the “girl next door” and invested in her Swifties’ lives, it was her next announcement of yet another “behind the scenes” six-part Showgirl documentary streaming on Disney Plus — £9.99 a month without ads — that started to rankle.
And when I finally visited her UK online merch store for potential Christmas presents, the blinkers really dropped from my eyes.
Veronica and daughter Martha at Wembley[/caption]
This cup will set you back £40[/caption]
This blue jacket is being flogged for £110[/caption]
And this hair grip is sold for £25[/caption]
According to Billboard there are 34 different versions of the new album — 18 CDs, eight vinyls and one cassette — as well as seven download variants. With no extra songs.
The CD is £11.99, the vinyl is £29.99 and the cassette £16.99.
If you want a version of each of these options — that’s almost £60.
While a black bomber jacket is £110, a diamante water bottle is £40 and a T-shirt dress is £85.
Call me old-fashioned, but I find that outrageous — and so far out of touch, Taylor might as well be flogging her tat from the moon
Or maybe you’d like to splash your hard-earned cash on a £70 hoodie, a £40 T-shirt or £25 Life Of A Showgirl earrings? Perhaps a £30 baseball cap, £60 sweatpants or a mint-green faux fur coat for £110?
If you are feeling flush, you can also shell out on a £35 phone cover, an instantly-losable £25 hair clip or £25 hairbrush.
As music critic Alexis Petridis said on the Today In Focus podcast: “Lucian Grainge, the CEO of Universal, sees the future of the music industry lying in something he calls engagement with superfans, redefining the merch experience, streaming 2.0, focusing on the value of an authentic relationship with the artist.
“But that all strikes me as a polite way of saying we’re going to get an artist’s biggest fans and turn them upside down until the last bit of change falls out of their pockets. It’s audacious.”
It certainly is Alex. When our daughters get a fiver a week pocket money — which everything they want has to come out of — how on Earth are they going to be able to keep up with the Swifties?
Although I very much doubt it’s those superfans who are now flogging the free posters from the CDs for £17 on eBay. Or her sold-out £60 crewnecks for nearly £100.
‘Week’s holiday’
In fact, when you tot up the entire lot on her site — just for this album — it comes to £1,395, although loads are sold out already.
Then if you take into account the 34 different versions of the album, that’s another £400 or thereabouts.
Plus the £33 for cinema tickets and £9.99 for Disney Plus ad-free, that comes to a grand total of around £1,900. Let’s put that in context. With their £20-a-month pocket money, that would take my daughters more than seven years to buy everything that comes with the new Taylor Swift album.
For the same price, you could get a week’s holiday for four in Gran Canaria right now.
In fact, there’s a second-hand Peugeot 306 convertible for sale in Croydon now for less than this.
Call me old-fashioned, but I find that outrageous — and so far out of touch, Taylor might as well be flogging her tat from the moon.
When her album hasn’t had the best reviews and during a cost-of- living crisis, who exactly does “relatable” Taylor think can afford that?
Certainly not members of The Tortured Parents Department.
The Life of a Showgirl Hairbrush costs £25[/caption]
The cassette is £16.99[/caption]
One of the 34 versions of Taylor Swift’s album[/caption]
And another version of the star’s album[/caption]
