Harry Styles' new album drop shows Taylor Swift how merch should be done

We've roped in music journalist and award-winning author Marc Burrows to tell us what he thinks about the world of pop, Harry Styles, Taylor Swift and the value for money you get on merch and ticket sales. Just how expensive and out of reach is it to be a fan in 2026? Marc gives us his views below...

Here’s a fun bit of maths for you. Harry Styles has just put up pre-orders for his new album, the rather brilliantly titled (if awkwardly punctuated) Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally. — and buried in the merch drop is something you don’t see very often in the pop world of 2026: actual value for money.

A t-shirt bundled with the album costs £31.99. A longsleeve, a lenticular print and the album together comes in at £39.99. These aren’t flash sales or limited-time offers, either.

Now try building the same basket on Taylor Swift’s UK store, where her latest album The Life of a Showgirl has been doing brisk business since last year. The cheapest t-shirt is £35. The cheapest CD is £11.99. There’s no equivalent bundle. You’re at £46.99 before you’ve even thought about postage. Fans of Taylor’s ex-boyfriend are roughly fifteen quid up on the same basic products. It’s not nothing.

Nobody’s suggesting Harry Styles is running a charity here. There’s no right or wrong. Both artists are selling things people want to buy. But the difference between these two stores points to a wider question — one that matters far more than pop star rivalry.

How expensive has it become to be a fan?

The era of the “complete” album

Taylor Swift has form here. Midnights, her brilliant 2022 album, was released across a dizzying number of formats and colour variants — Moonstone Blue, Blood Moon, Mahogany, Jade Green, Lavender — spanning CD, vinyl and cassette. The four main vinyl editions featured back covers that lined up to form a clock face which fans could turn into a real clock with the addition of a rather smart wood and brass mechanism … available from the official Taylor webstore for another $50, natch.

It’s not been a cheap few years to be a Swiftie. The Tortured Poets Department became a case study in modern completionism. BuzzFeed counted 36 distinct variants, many released in short windows and often tied to exclusive bonus tracks. On release day, as fans excitedly ripped the cellophane from their pre-orders, Swift casually announced a double-disc edition with new artwork was about to drop.

The Life of a Showgirl is already following a familiar pattern: there’s now over 30 versions of the album available, released in stages. Taylor’s UK store lists 43 merchandise Showgirl-themed items in total, including an £85 bathrobe. We’re told that the album sold over four million copies in its first week. It sounds a lot until you realise that’s just a dozen or so very keen Swifties trying to get every variant. (Okay, that last part isn’t entirely true. But one fan did spend $800 on 26 versions, and he won’t have been the only one.)

None of this is unusual in 2026. It’s just how major pop releases now work.

A quieter alternative

Harry Styles’ drop is more restrained. The vinyl comes in different colours — “Tomato” (it’s red), “Smoke Machine” (it’s grey), “Kiss” (it’s pink) and, well, black (it’s black) — but the music is the same whichever one you choose. There are no format-exclusive tracks and no sense that you’re missing part of the album if you pick the “wrong” version. If you buy all four then you’ve only got yourself to blame.

Merch is annoying. Tickets are brutal.

Where things really escalate is live shows.

With Harry’s new album, pre-ordering any format also grants access to a pre-sale for his 2026 London and Amsterdam dates. It’s not automatic magic, there’s a deadline, and codes are sent out later. Ticket sites will inevitably meltdown, as they did with the Eras tour and its for-the-dads equivalent, the Oasis reunion, but the principle is still sound: buying the album doubles as access currency. That’s not to be sniffed at.

The Eras tour broke hearts as well as records: tickets were already expensive, sold out quickly through maddeningly shonky webstores and resale prices were in the thousands. It’s tickets, not merch, where fandom now hits its financial cliff edge.

The pressure adds up

Research on scarcity and limited editions shows that products marketed with time-limited availability or low supply activate psychological drives like FOMO and urgency, often increasing consumers’ desire to buy before an opportunity disappears. Studies of scarcity messaging find that such cues make items seem more valuable and spur quicker purchase decisions.

That pressure doesn’t usually arrive as a single big purchase. It arrives in manageable increments. A different vinyl colour. A bonus track. A new poster. A pre-sale code. A £10 difference here, a £15 one there. That all adds up. Not because one t-shirt or one album will break the bank, but because modern fandom is built on repetition. Small decisions, made often, under a low hum of urgency. “If we buy them all now, she’ll get a number one! If we miss them, they’re gone!”

Harry Styles’ merch drop feels designed to answer a simple question: what would a fan reasonably want to buy? Taylor Swift’s store reflects a different logic — how much can we get a fan to buy? It doesn’t make Taylor the bad guy here, no-one’s making her fans fork out for this stuff. You can, however, see how she became a billionaire.

Neither approach is accidental, and neither is necessarily right or wrong. But for fans trying to support the artists they love without emptying their accounts, one of them makes it a lot easier to know when to stop.