The only variants people really had an issue with for Taylor was the excessive download variants, with 1 different song each time, that materialised at convenient moments. Nothing wrong per sé but it's not the same as Gaga or anyone else (which in my view is no issue anyway)

37 minutes ago, 777666jason said:

Chart manipulation 🤣🤣 yep fans were forced at gunpoint to buy every variant 🤣🤣 heck I'm a massive Taylor fan and I haven't even bought 1 variant just streamed the anthology to death is she manipulating me 😱

Depends on your definition of gun point. If we use it as a symbolic analogy then they were for sure. A full on marketing team using psychological tricks and sales tactics to naive fans. Big blazing ‘limited edition’ logos. Rushing people with clock countdowns and short deadlines to impulse buy before the ‘opportunity’ is gone. All for what? The exact same album they already had but a bonus live version of one of the 30+ tracks on there. If she released everything on week 1, i wouldn’t have an issue or call it chart manipulation. But it was literally done in a way to manipulate weeks and weeks of the chart by using the same people to buy the same album over and over.

9 minutes ago, Liam S said:

Depends on your definition of gun point. If we use it as a symbolic analogy then they were for sure. A full on marketing team using psychological tricks and sales tactics to naive fans. Big blazing ‘limited edition’ logos. Rushing people with clock countdowns and short deadlines to impulse buy before the ‘opportunity’ is gone. All for what? The exact same album they already had but a bonus live version of one of the 30+ tracks on there. If she released everything on week 1, i wouldn’t have an issue or call it chart manipulation. But it was literally done in a way to manipulate weeks and weeks of the chart by using the same people to buy the same album over and over.

You act like other artist don't pull similar tricks , heck some deliberately hold back physicals to different weeks bit hey ho because someone is popular it's chart manipulation 🤣🤣🤣

And no you are still given the option to purchase or not so actual that metaphorical gun is still none existent

It's kinda bad of me for not stating specifics but I was very much just talking about physical variants and that's mainly because A- I forgot all about the digital releases tbh and B- there were reports that stated specifically that Taylor would have still been number 1 even without the digital downloads, so digital downloads (especially through an artists webstore) don't count for much... ever.

When talking about "variants" I always just immediately think and assume we're all talking physical formats

Gaga's sales aren't terrible but they arent' impressive either given the plethora of variants. Ariana nor Beyoncé didnt match half of her bundles /variants and i doubt they had CD's in stores either.

1 minute ago, Gojo said:

Gaga's sales aren't terrible but they arent' impressive either given the plethora of variants. Ariana nor Beyoncé didnt match half of her bundles /variants and i doubt they had CD's in stores either.

Ariana definitely had CDs in stores on release week.

Ariana definitely had CDs I purchased a couple of those on release week. I think there were a total of 5 covers for eternal sunshine right? And vinyl bundles too.

14 hours ago, Tafty said:

My issues lie within fanbases trying to shame other fanbases for buying every variant their faves release but when it comes to their own faves, they're happy to buy every variant themselves... keep the same energy?? But that's just stan culture at it's absolute worst.

Honestly this so much!