‘Boycott Target’ Beats Taylor Swift on iTunes

An anti-Target song topped the iTunes sales chart on Tuesday, prompting cheers from conservatives despite negligible performance on streaming apps, like Spotify.

Target is the latest company being targeted online by conservatives with boycott threats over support for the LGBTQ+ community. The popular big box store chain recently announced a scaling back of its Pride Month merchandise selection, claiming to have received threats to its employees over the products. A store in Layton, Utah, meanwhile, was forced to evacuate after receiving a bomb threat, a similar tactic reportedly deployed against Anheuser-Busch. Justin Wolfers, a professor of Public Policy and Economics at the University of Michigan, called these behaviors “literally terrorism.”

The trend of conservative backlash against companies supporting LGBTQ+ communities has exploded in recent months, despite such support from corporations having been standard practice for years. Speaking with NBC News, marketing experts and advocates pinned the trend on an increasingly “vocal minority of far-right political commentators, conservative politicians, and religious legal groups.” An LGBTQ+ program director for the watchdog group, Media Matters, also spoke to NBC News, highlighting the outsized influence of figures like the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh in attempting to make support for queer communities “toxic for brands.” Industry estimates put the buying power of LGBTQ+ communities in the U.S. at around $900 billion per year, giving companies a strong incentive to market toward them.

One of the byproducts of the Target backlash is a song called “Boycott Target,” released by Florida hip-hop artist Forgiato Blow, a staunch supporter of Donald Trump and one of the main figures in the small subgenre of “MAGA rap.” On Tuesday, the track reached the top of the iTunes charts, a metric driven by consumers purchasing digital copies of songs on the platform, outpacing new tracks from the likes of Taylor Swift and Miley Cyrus.

Despite cheers from some conservatives, iTunes sales numbers are considered a dated metric for tracking the success of music, since most modern consumers prefer the use of streaming services to buying digital songs. Songs with overt conservative political themes have regularly reached to upper ranks of the iTunes charts, as older audiences tend to be more likely to buy songs, and only a relatively small number of consumers need to do so in order to impact chart performance.

Stream numbers on services like Spotify are more indicative of overall consumer reactions to music. On Spotify, the most popular song from Swift’s latest album, “Anti-Hero,” boasts nearly 870 million streams as of Tuesday. Her 2014 single, “Blank Space,” boasts over 1.2 billion streams, with her music overall receiving nearly 87 million monthly listeners.

By comparison, Blow’s “Boycott Target” has received only 33,000 streams in five days of release. His most popular songs have yet to break 3 million streams and he receives only around 120,000 monthly listeners.

Newsweek reached out to Apple via email for additional information.