“It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me”: is it the chorus of Taylor Swift’s latest single “Anti-Hero”—or is it a confession? To be sure, there’s a lot of confessional content on Midnights. (“No one wanted to play with me as a little kid / So I’ve been scheming like a criminal ever since.” Oof!) But in this case, we refer specifically to the fact that the new album reportedly crashed Spotify upon release. She’s the problem, get it?
As soon as the clock struck midnight for Midnights, fans were apparently streaming so furiously that the app couldn’t handle it. According to Bloomberg, “As many as 7,844 outages were reported by users across the global monitoring service Downdetector at 1:10 a.m. in New York.” Luckily, the issue appears to have been resolved by 3 A.M. ET, at which time the Grammy winner released an additional seven songs as a “chaotic surprise.” Spotify surely wouldn’t have wanted to be on the wrong side of the Swifties when that dropped.
If Swift’s history is anything to go by, the next thing that Midnights will break is records. She’s currently on track to break the U.S. weekly vinyl sales record currently held by her rumored ex-boyfriend Harry Styles (who sold 182,000 copies of Harry’s House in the first week, per Quartz) thanks to a clever “put these four vinyls together and make a clock!” gimmick. That’s pop music’s capitalist queen for you: when someone tells you how Machiavellian they are, believe them!
For now, though, it’s all about the music, which was brought into the world by a crack team that includes longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff, Lana Del Rey, Zoë Kravitz, and All Too Well short film star Dylan O’Brien. While the world debates the merits of the “sexy baby” lyric, Swift is somewhere cackling and rubbing her hands together. (Even if the jokes aren’t funny, she’ll still take the money.) She’s in her Anti-Hero era, after all.
