Remember a couple of years ago when Johnny Farnham got in all that trouble over his (alleged) farewell tour?
It's one of those things that float into the back of your mind every so often, but the specifics are a bit hazy. Back in 2004, Farnsey had just wrapped up his The Last Time tour, only to suddenly announce a string of new shows with Tom Jones a few months later.
At least one fan was a bit miffed that they had just forked out to see Whispering Jack supposedly for the "last time" only to discover that he wasn't going anywhere, and decided to take their complaint to the national consumer watchdog claiming the 430,000-odd folks who had tickets to the Last shows had been victims of false advertising.
"These statements might be viewed as bait advertising, as they were calculated to ensure massive ticket and CD sales by making the public believe Farnham was going into retirement," the fan said in the press at the time.
But despite some minor pot-stirring in the Sydney fish-wrappers, the ACCC ultimately revealed in September '04 it had received only "one call as of yesterday" and that no action was underway.
That line - "calculated to ensure massive ticket sales" - was on my mind this week when a few friends opened up their phones on Thursday morning to find Taylor Swift was planning to release yet another version of her Midnights album.
(For those keeping track, we're now somewhere north of 20 different versions - according to Billboard - since the first release in October last year, if you count CDs, LPs, exclusive releases, a few cassettes, concert-only versions, and all that swag in different colours.)
The new version reportedly features a re-recorded "duet" with signer-songwriter Lana Del Ray that fans have been crying out for after the first version apparently didn't feature enough of Del Ray's vocals, as well as a collaboration with US rapper Ice Spice on the track Karma.
As the fervour mounted, I shot a text to a couple of friends who have a growing collection of Midnights on their record shelves to see how they were feeling.
"I feel great about it" one wrote back in all-caps, before adding that it was "def a money grab" and "taking advantage of the adoration of her fans".
But sentiment notwithstanding, not many have said definitively that they won't pre-order or go out and buy the new release.
When I asked another friend yesterday, she linked the success of all these versions to the relatability of the music and said Swift has tapped into something deeply personal with her fans: "When you see someone loved by the masses, and who also sometimes doesn't seem real (celebrities, am I right?), [and they're] going through what you've gone through, you want to hang on to that," she said.
Midnights has been billed as one of TSwiz's most personal albums and, by all accounts, the fans can tell. She has made an industry out of an endearing display of artistic anxiety; she wants to make a perfect album, and she is apparently going to keep chipping away at it until she gets there.
"But where does she draw the line?" my friend asked, "How many more editions before it becomes over the top?"
It's a fair question.
Some quick calculations show that if you're one of those fans who bought in at the beginning of Midnights, and you bought vinyl, you could have conservatively spent as much as $450 on one album by now.
Surely that has to be at least part of the reason why Swift has managed to buck the trend of dwindling album sales as the music world lurches towards digital streaming. In 2019, as album and song sales continued declining annually, Swift was the only artist to crack one million sales for her song Lover.
It's not that the tunes aren't bangers (they are! Don't @ me, Swifties), but there is an element of undeniably shrewd business here that hangs a question mark over the ethics of having your fans fork out repeatedly for different versions of what is functionally the same thing.
Avenged Sevenfold's frontman, M Shadows, courted the wrath of the Swifties a few months back when he suggested that the strategy of packaging and repackaging albums was "fan abuse".
Swift herself managed to draw the ire of her followers a couple of years ago with a Ticketmaster-partnered scheme that encouraged fans to buy merch through her website as a way of "boosting your activity score" to secure tickets to upcoming shows.
TSwiz is by no means the only artist to be finding new ways to squeeze her fans, of course. Pop megastar Lizzo slips a discrete ad for Nike into her hit tune Good As Hell, and Pitbull declares "Voli's the new vodka" in his party anthem Rain on Me - just to name a few examples.
But it is undeniable that Swift has made a killing, at least in part, not just by having her fans willingly by multiple copies of the same album, but by endearing herself to her listeners as she does it.
There's no denying the popularity of her music, but her appeal also seems to be linked to the way she brings fans along (either through clever marketing or not) on the process of how her music is made. It's not just that the fans I spoke with this week want the music - they also want the margin notes and the early song drafts; they want the shed sessions and home listening parties. And Swift, for her part, is happy to give it.
Digging back into the archives, I came across this line from an ACCC spokesperson when they were asked about dealing with the Farnsey Affair in 2004: "One of the things we have to examine," they said, "is consumer detriment - and what is the consumer detriment? ... (Farnham) is now available to some of his fans at smaller venues."
And when you think about it like that, things start to line up. What is the consumer detriment of more than 20 versions of Midnights? By all accounts, it seems that it's that fans are getting more of the songs that they clearly want and have been asking for.
Of course, there will be criticism - no artist so entrenched in the broad appeal of the mainstream is exempt. Some of those criticisms will be valid (like that of Swift's suspiciously well-timed collaboration with Ice Spice in the wake of rumoured new beau Matty Healy's objectively heinous comments about the artist on a recent podcast) and some of them won't be.
But for the time being, it seems that Swift has made a half-billion-dollar industry out of simply obliging the whims of her fans and giving them what they want. And that's just good business.
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