What's going on with Taylor Swift?

Remember in 2023, when Taylor was selected as TIME magazine's Person of the Year, billionaire Elon Musk tweeted a message on X that he congratulated her, but also warned that the singer would face criticism.  At that time, most users considered this a somewhat confusing statement, but after 1 year since that "congratulation", Elon Musk's predictions seem to be more correct than ever.

After just one day of release, "The Tortured Poets Department" has divided music critics across the United States. While The Rolling Stone, NME... praised this as the female singer's best album, on the contrary, Pitchfork, The New York Times, Sputnik Music... all said that this was a relatively unfortunate step backward. In the reviews, instead of focusing on music, commentators also mentioned other aspects of the singer's personal life such as her love life, then repeated the accusation of "climate crime". . Although The Rolling Stone praised the quality of the record, it also sparked controversy by calling this album a "better version" of the breakup records from Adele and Olivia Rodrigo...

Pitchfork gave the album 6.6 points, becoming the female singer's lowest-scoring album ever. Sputnik Music shows a confusion, when in just a short time, there are 3 scores reserved for her: from above average, average and below average. It's quite normal for a page to have many people rate and score it, but what's special is that observant audiences realize that the scores on this page are constantly being lowered, and this is a unique phenomenon from before. This is so common that Bloomberg had to write an article to comment that enjoying music takes time, and to comment on an album with more than 30 songs requires more than 24 hours. One journalist later had to apologize for his hasty assessments…

However, this is not the only strange thing, but in the project "The Tortured Poets Department", it can be seen that the female singer's label Universal Music Group (UMG) also had the opposite reaction. Accordingly, if in the past Taylor Swift had full rights to launch products and the record label owners were always ready, interested and supported her albums because this was a great source of profit, then with the latest album, this cannot be seen. UMG's fan page only has rare articles supporting the release of this new album. They also have no support activities for chart running or communication plans for the new album.

To be fair, the above is relatively normal, as there are many female artists who have to try to complete their contracts to move to another record label, because their current label no longer tries to support them. We can mention people like Christina Aguilera, Leona Lewis, Alicia Keys, Miley Cyrus... But it can be said that none of the above names have the recognition and popularity like Taylor Swift. Therefore, the above is a reason that shows that the female singer is having conflicts with record labels.

The first move to demonstrate this is that Taylor Swift brought her own music catalog under the brand (Taylor Version's) back to the TikTok social network, although UMG had previously spoken out about withdrawing the artists' music because they think TikTok doesn't pay them a fair fee for their creations. Although UMG recently said they had reached a consensus with the above social network, Taylor's single-handed actions increasingly show the different orientations of both sides.

In addition, there are many rumors showing that Taylor and the record label owners are having a lot of conflicts. Although owning original masters means a lot to creators, for record labels, this is a big loss. After Taylor, young artists like Dua Lipa have also raised awareness, choosing the path of owning masters, having the right to be proactive with their creativity instead of handing over a large part to record labels. This caused the big companies to add a clause that artists could only re-record their own versions after 15, 20 or 30 years, to ensure profits. And with the current growth of the Taylor Swift name, the possibility of her separating and establishing her own record label is entirely possible.

One point that is also said to contribute to confirming the above statement is that the female singer has seamlessly released many albums over the past time. After the popular version "The Tortured Poets Department" was released at 00:00 US, just 2 hours later, the additional version "The Anthology" with 16 songs was also released immediately. Many astute fans realize that this is somewhat different from the duo "folklore" and "evermore", when even though they were done at the same time and had quite similar material, Taylor still left some time off for the two projects. So why are both versions of “The Tortured Poets Department” so close? Many people believe that this is an act of wanting to quickly end the contract with the record label, so that she can open her own record label.

This is also explained in terms of quality, when many parties believe that the tracks in the two versions are not ready to be released. They aren't groundbreaking in terms of melody or arrangement and feel like they were added from songs that didn't make it into the final version. This is similar to other singers, when instead of creating new albums, they often release compilation albums and greatest hits discs as a final farewell to the record label. Taylor's actions can be seen as mentioned above, because she is inherently a mastermind, and also understands both the advantages and disadvantages of testing this option.