Hey, everyone. Anthony Fantano here, the internet's busiest music nerd. I hope you're doing well. Let's talk about something we don't often dive too deep into on this channel, the charts.

Yes, the billboard charts, the most popular singles and albums out there today. They're not usually that interesting of a topic, and because you're normal, you're most likely not aware that for the past seven weeks, without fail, the number one top dog on the albums chart on has been Taylor Swift's Tortured Poets Department.

That's right. Despite some pretty massive pop artists as of late, dropping new LPs, putting their hat in the ring, they have been deprived of that number one spot. Dua Lipa, Billie Eilish, most recently, whose numbers in her first week of sales and streams fell just below Taylor's.

Now, for any of you who actually heard the Tortured Poets Department and observed the general reception of the album, you might be confused. Why is the record still sitting at the highest spot on the billboard right now? Obviously, the record is still seeing a lot of streams and a lot of purchases, but this whole thing isn't exactly happening organically, let's say.

In the weeks since this album's release, Taylor Swift keeps putting out and keeps reintroducing new versions of the album. Of course, you've got CD, you've got cassette, you've got different vinyl variants, different track lists being featured among some of these. There are actually new digital versions of the album that have been introduced, too, which feature like phone draft memo versions of songs from the album. Let me not also neglect to mention you had the standard edition of the album and the anthology that added an entire record's worth of material on top of it to start.

Look, don't get me wrong here. Taylor Swift, by all means, had a very well-engineered and planned-out rollout to start for the Tortured Poets Department. The music industry and streaming platforms have all the incentive in the world to push a record like this as much as possible because her stuff typically is so listenable, so digestible. But make no mistake, with these new versions and with these constant reintroductions of the record, Taylor Swift is fighting tooth and nail to stay at this number one spot with this album. As excessive as this may seem to any non-fan of Taylor Swift or maybe any person who doesn't really follow the pop side of the music industry that closely, what Taylor is doing here isn't all that egregious.

Unfortunately, every year it becomes more and more the standard. And artists have been pushing for ways to inflate their album sales for quite a while now. I mean, at one point, it was the whole bundles thing with tickets and other stuff, and then Billboard put the kabash on that. These days, it seems to be taking more this shape. I mean, even Billie Eilish herself has tons and tons of different of her new record out now. I mean, this is just the current-day game of the music industry, and ultimately, you can't really be mad at Taylor, per se, for just playing it better.

But I feel like what she did most recently, It takes the cake a little bit and seems very obviously petty, because if you guys were aware, one of the biggest and most recent pop records to drop this past week was Charli XCX's Brat. Hopefully, at this point, nobody in the comments needs Charli XCX's existence and popularity and music style explained to them. You should know this by now. If not, maybe go check out my Brat review. Go check out her past projects, check out everything.

Either way, I've been enjoying Charli's stuff for quite a while, and she has a reputation for being one of these, I would say mid-tier, not in an insulting way, almost like cult following type pop artists, where their style and their sound is just a little bit alternative, but simultaneously, they do have some massive hits in their catalog. And while they may not be as mainstream as a Taylor Swift, for example, they're still undeniably making pop music that is of a very high level of quality.

Again, you could say this about Charli XCX, you could say this about Carly Rae Jepsen. There are a lot of artists that fit into this lane. Now, the interesting thing about Charli and Brat is that it's her most commercially successful record to date, despite the fact that her last album, Crash, was very obviously an attempt on her part on making music that had a wider appeal on Brat. She wasn't going for that quite as obviously, and lo and behold, this record actually ended up doing better numbers-wise.

Still, though, even with Charli killing it in record sales in the way that she has been with this album, the record was not any threat at all to Taylor Swift being at the number one spot on the Billboard 200 this week. I mean, as good as Charli's sales are, they're just not really quite at that level. The album did manage to land at number three on Billboard, though, which is really impressive for her, and it's great to see her having that success.

However, Charli isn't from the US. She's from the UK, where her fan base is a bit more saturated across the population. She was expected to chart much better there and was pretty likely to take that number one spot this week. However, the same week Charli drops this album, Taylor Swift put out a UK-only edition of the Tortured Poets Department, which to me seems like too pointed and too specific of a decision by Taylor and her team to not be in reaction to Brat being released. Charli also seemingly tried to bolster her numbers a little bit this week as well, dropping a new version of Brat that had three additional tracks on it, a couple of really good bangers, spring breakers and guests, which have really been popping off among the fans numbers-wise.

And look, Charli sales in the UK this week for her new record were quite good, but she still was deprived of that number one spot. Now, not all hope is lost if you even care about Brat going number one anywhere to begin with, because it seems like the fans are really enjoying the album, that a lot of tracks on it are staying in constant rotation. The record's numbers could hold strong for another couple of weeks, and maybe Charli will get it toward the end of this month, something like that. If she gets it, if she doesn't get it, ultimately, it doesn't matter because she made an incredible record. It's going to be a pop record that will be defining the esthetics of the genre for a minute and really setting the standard for club music, generally. And that's the impact and influence you can't really force.

Ultimately, while I guess Taylor Swift is entitled to release as many versions of her album as she wants, wherever she wants, these moves just continually reek of desperation on her part. A total lack of shame, too, as she seems to just not be pumping the brakes at all on shoving this record down everyone's throat, a record that many believe to have some of her weakest and most obnoxious songwriting to date, not to mention completely stale production from Jack Antonoff, too. But there you have it, ladies and gentlemen. You can, in fact, keep mid at the number one spot, as long as you have a rabid fan base willing to consume it over and over and over and over again and purchase and repurchase every single time you put out new iterations of it.

Oh, and you also need someone petty enough to see other artists in music industry as their competition and then to be strategically trying to prevent those artists from getting any shine off of their new records, too. How's that for me, me, me, me, me feminism? And I think we can leave it there.

Anthony Fantano, The Tortured Poets Department, Number One, Forever.