As we discussed earlier this week, there are shenanigans afoot in the pop girl world. Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department has been atop all of the charts since it was released a month ago. Then, last week, Billie Eilish’s Hit Me Hard and Soft was released and Billie has been doing a big rollout for it. Taylor had been especially active all around Billie’s album release, offering all kinds of TTPD digital specials in an effort to maintain her #1 spot on the Billboard charts. Taylor’s “gaming the system” tactics are par for the course – she does it with every album, and her fans eat it up. But her moves around Billie’s album release have caused many fans to suggest that Billie and Taylor are legitimately at war, especially after Billie made some shady comments about “wasteful” artists releasing twenty million album variants. Even the New York Times is keeping track of the brewing Swift-Eilish Cold War:

A cold war between pop music titans — or at least their mobilizing fan bases and record labels — turned into a digital arms race this week as both Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish gunned for the No. 1 spot on next week’s Billboard album chart.

Swift, 34, has occupied the top of the Billboard 200 for the past four weeks with her blockbuster new album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” which has earned more than 3.6 million equivalent album sales so far (counting physical purchases, downloads and streams). But Eilish’s well-reviewed new album, “Hit Me Hard and Soft,” is challenging for No. 1 in its debut, as its 10 songs prove popular on streaming services like Spotify.

Still, when Swift pre-empted the release of Eilish’s album last week with three special digital editions of “Tortured Poets,” available for 24 hours and including previously unheard “first-draft phone memo” demos, many saw the move as pointed. Especially online, where pop fan allegiance can be a blood sport, the matchup became one to watch.

Eilish soon released her own new digital edition of “Hit Me Hard and Soft,” which added isolated vocal tracks for each song. Such maneuvers — in which listeners invested in the chart success of their favorites are incentivized to stream and buy more with bonus content — are popular and common, especially amid close contests for bragging rights, in the chess game that is the modern music business. But it didn’t end there.

On Tuesday, Swift released a remix of her hit “Fortnight”; on Wednesday, Eilish posted a new remix of “L’Amour De Ma Vie.” And on Thursday, the final day of Billboard’s tracking week, Eilish expanded her album again, releasing limited edition versions of each song both slowed down and sped up. (Eilish’s labels, Darkroom/Interscope, also discounted “Hit Me Hard and Soft” to $4.99 as an iTunes download — a more popular chart-minded move in an earlier era of digital sales — while Swift’s “Tortured Poets” remained at $14.99. Swift’s “Fortnight” remix was priced at 69 cents, less than the typical single price of 99 cents or $1.29.)

Then, on Thursday evening, with six hours left in the sales window for the week, Swift made what seemed to be a final push, releasing three additional digital versions for sale on her website, each of which featured a new live track from her Eras Tour performances earlier this month in Paris. The special editions were made available for one day only.

[From The NY Times]

LOL, I actually sort of enjoy the fact that Billie is playing the game, that she’s like “okay, Taylor, you want to do this, let’s do this.” Taylor’s going to win though, in the sense that TTPD will likely be #1 this week. In another sense, Billie wins no matter what though – she’s exposed Taylor as an especially desperate stunt queen resorting to a million different gimmicks because Taylor only gives a sh-t about numbers.

Billie’s perfectly capable of being a shady drama queen too. In a livestream event held this week, Billie was asked about artists who do three-hour concerts, and this is what Billie said: “I’m not doing a 3-hour show. That’s literally psychotic. Nobody wants that. You guys don’t want that. I don’t want that. I don’t even want that as a fan. Even my favourite artists I’m not trying to hear them for 3 hours. That’s far too long. That’s literally psychotic.” LOL. Taylor’s Eras concerts are more than three hours, correct? To be fair, Taylor has the discography. She has the hits for three-hour shows. Billie is 22 years old and this is only her third studio album.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images, Backgrid. Album covers courtesy of Taylor Swift.