Is Taylor Swift Losing Momentum Ahead of New Album Reputation?

A Statistical Analysis of “Look What You Made Me Do,” “…Ready For It?” and “Gorgeous”

There’s no denying that Taylor Swift’s (ahem) Reputation has taken a hit lately.

Ever since Kim Kardashian outed the singer last year for having given Kanye West approval for his Taylor-referencing “Famous” verse and then backpedalling to play the victim, Swift has been dogged — at least in internet circles — by accusations of fakeness (and snake emojis).

Whether that will affect the success of her forthcoming sixth album has yet to be determined; we decided to take a look at BuzzAngle data to see if we could make any kind of predictions about how Reputation might be received.

We looked at the Canadian streaming numbers of each of Swift’s three new singles in the five days following their individual releases to see what they suggested about her popularity heading into Reputation’s November 10 release, and found that Swift might actually be stumbling somewhat — at least by her high standards.

While her return with “Look What You Made Me Do” (released August 24) garnered her a whopping two million streams, it seems as though “…Ready For It?” (out September 3), which rode the former’s coattails to 1.3 million streams, lost her some goodwill. Third single “Gorgeous” (out October 20) reaped just 771,195 streams, a sizeable amount for any artist, but not Swift’s usual numbers.

And lest you think that it’s typical for artists to lose momentum quickly an initial burst: Swift nemesis Katy Perry’s third single before releasing 2017’s Witness, “Swish Swish,” matched the performance of her second single “Bon Appetit” in its first five days, while Ed Sheeran’s twin release of “Shape of You” and “Castle on the Hill” both fared better than Swift’s back-toback singles.

Will that affect Swift’s overall record streams and sales? That remains to be seen. But numbers don’t lie, and as you can see, they seem to be dwindling. Perhaps there’s a fourth Reputation single to win her back some muchneeded glory.