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Taylor Swift’s Reputation is finally out on streaming

Taylor Swift’s album cover for “Reputation.”
Taylor Swift’s album cover for “Reputation.”
Big Machine
Constance Grady
Constance Grady is a senior correspondent on the Culture team for Vox, where since 2016 she has covered books, publishing, gender, celebrity analysis, and theater.

Starting Friday, December 1, Taylor Swift’s Reputation has hit the major music streaming services, Billboard reports.

Since its release on November 10, Reputation has not been available for legal streaming anywhere on the internet, meaning that if you wanted your fix, you had to purchase either a physical copy or a digital download of the full album. The move was in keeping with Swift’s general philosophy that if there is a high demand for certain music, it should be more expensive than other music: “I think that people should feel that there is a value to what musicians have created, and that’s that,” Swift told Time in 2014.

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Perhaps in part because it was so difficult to stream, and in part because Swift has encouraged her diehard fans to buy multiple copies, Reputation has sold extremely well over the past few weeks. It hit 1.45 million units sold by November 23 and is already the best-selling album of 2017. It hasn’t quite lived up to Swift’s ambitious goals, though: Her label reportedly told its accounts that it was expecting Reputation to sell 2 million copies in the first week alone, but the album barely cleared 1.29 million instead. (That’s still Swift’s best sales week ever, so it’s not a failure — it’s just not the monster hit her label was expecting.)

The album also debuted to mixed reviews. While Rolling Stone extolled Swift’s “most intimate LP yet,” Pitchfork declared it to be “sadly conventional.”

As of Thursday night, Spotify, Apple Music, and other streaming platforms had uploaded Reputation, but only the singles that were released prior to its debut were available for streaming. But as of Friday, they’re all ready to go. Looks like we can have nice things after all.

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