I pre-ordered Midnights, Taylor Swift’s last studio album, only to discover when I got up on release day that she’d released a previously-unannounced deluxe “3 AM” edition with several extra tracks three fucking hours after the base version of the album released. She waited three hours and then released an entire new version of the album while I have to assume the vast majority of the people who had preordered were still fucking asleep and hadn’t had time to even listen to Midnights yet.

When The Tortured Poets Department got announced, with a pre-order available, although you could, if you wanted to, spend $1.99 to download something or another that was eight seconds long, I decided there were probably going to be shenanigans afoot again and decided not to pre-order the thing this time. It didn’t look like she was releasing any singles anyway, and she didn’t.

iTunes insisted that the thing was coming out on the 21st, so I was a little surprised when my wife let me know yesterday that it was out already. And that I’d been exactly right– Taylor had pulled the exact same bullshit move again, only worse— that now the new version was a fucking double album, and was clearly the version that she intended to release, for a dollar more than the original pre-order price, and a different cover, and yep, you can still order the original, half-length version if you want to … and every single person who pre-ordered it got the inferior version, because no fucker anywhere knew the “Anthology” version even existed prior to it being released a few hours after the fake-out version.

I have come around on her music after many years of loathing her, but holy shit, is this a bullshit move, and the people it’s hurting the most are her biggest fans. I can’t believe I’m not hearing more about it; maybe it’s a function of the fact that most people stream nowadays. I don’t know what proportion of her fanbase is still buying digital music rather than streaming it. One way or another, I feel like she– and by definition, Apple, as well as whoever else might have been involved in this– owes her fans either a fucking way to get a refund or a way to buy the extra tracks for a dollar. This is an absolute fucking asshole move.

Never, ever, pre-order a Taylor Swift album, kids.

(I haven’t listened to it yet, by the way. The new Pearl Jam album is, after four more listens in addition to the two in the theater, absolutely fucking phenomenal, and it’s absorbed my attention. I’ll give it a spin this weekend sometime.)