Present the rock of the much criticized text full of double meanings of Wood by Taylor Swift? The stone is among the protagonists of the video Opalite which the pop star has just published, second excerpt from The Life of a Showgirl. Among others, Graham Norton, Lewis Capaldi, Domhnall Gleeson, Jodie Turner-Smith, Greta Lee, Cillian Murphy also appear. They are precisely the guests of the episode of Graham Norton Show (“one of my favorite shows,” Swift explained) from four months ago where she talked about her engagement to Travis Kelce. In fact, it was at that moment that the idea sprang to the mind of the pop star who, after the show, prepared a first draft of the subject of the video, asking the various participants to “go back in time with us to the 90s”. Images from the TV show appear at the end of the video (spoiler: the stone gets engaged to the cactus).
You can see the video of Opalite on Spotify and Apple Music, but not on YouTube and the reason could have to do with the desire to push the song to number one in the charts in America, repeating the exploit of the album's launch single The Fate of Ophelia. In the past, Swift has managed to place more than one song from the same album at the top of the charts only at the time of 1989 with Shake It Off And Blank Space in 2014 and Bad Blood in 2015.
The Billboard Hot 100, which is the reference chart for singles in the United States, recently reiterated its desire to weigh the streams of song videos made on YouTube differently compared to the streams of songs on platforms such as Spotify or Apple Music. The idea is that the former are not worth as much as the latter and therefore for the purposes of the Hot 100 ranking, listening to a song that you search for on a streaming service by paying a subscription has greater weight than watching a video for free, thanks to an advertising message. Once upon a time the ratio was 1:3, meaning for ranking purposes a single stream of a song done (let's assume) on paid Spotify is worth the same as three non-combined streams of the video on YouTube. The ratio has become 1:2.5.
It's a logic that YouTube disputes. Giving more weight to subscription streams over ad-supported ones, says a statement from the platform, «does not reflect the way fans interact with music today and ignores the mass of people who do not have a subscription. Streaming is the primary way people listen to music and accounts for 84% of recorded music revenues in the United States. We simply ask that every stream be counted fairly and equally, whether subscription-based or ad-supported, because every fan matters and every play should count.”
In protest, “after a decade of negotiations and collaboration”, YouTube has decided to no longer provide streaming data to Billboard from January 16, 2026 so that it can be considered for the rankings. In other words, millions of people can watch the video of I Just Might by Bruno Mars, but those streams will not count towards the rankings.
Likewise, if Swift had released the video of Opalite even on YouTube, where most people watch video clips, those streams don't on demand they would have had no effect on the ranking. By diverting fans, and there are many, who want to see the video on paid platforms, it allows it to capitalize on more plays and push Opalite even higher on the Hot 100. For the same reason, Swift released a physical version of the single, whose copies sold count much more than streaming in determining the chart positions.
Curiously, Swift's new video opens with a fake vintage commercial for a product called Opalite, which appears before the song, just like on YouTube.
Opalite appeared in the America chart in October, in the wake of the album's release, reaching number two behind The Fate of Ophelia. At the moment Opalite is stable at number 10, while Ophelia it's still at number 5. It's at number one Openings by Harry Styles.
