It was the news that Swifties had long waited for: “Opalite,” the fan-favorite second single from Taylor Swift’s blockbuster The Life of a Showgirl album, was getting a music video.
The official visual for the breezy pop-rock hit was released to Apple Music and Spotify on Friday morning (Feb. 6), with the YouTube premiere to follow on Sunday. The video co-stars Domnhall Gleeson, who’d joked during a recent co-appearance with Swift on The Graham Norton Show about being in her new video. (Norton also makes a cameo, as do Greta Lee, Jodie Turner-Smith, Lewis Capaldi and Cillian Murphy, who were all also on the episode with Swift and Gleeson.)
In addition to the video premiere, the song is now out on on 7-inch vinyl for the first time — with the “Life Is a Song Acoustic Version” of “Opalite” on the single’s B-side — and will be available for purchase for just 48 hours. The 7-inch is currently up for pre-order on her website, and is listed as being ready to ship “on or about February 9,” or this coming Monday. (The acoustic version is also available for streaming on DSPs.)
The lining up of the video’s premiere with the 7-inch’s release in the same tracking week (Feb. 6-12) will undoubtedly lead Swifties and other chartwatchers to be paying close attention to the next week’s Billboard Hot 100 (dated Feb. 21), where we will see if the corresponding bumps in streams and sales can lead the song to capture the No. 1 spot for the first time. “Opalite” previously bowed at its No. 2 Hot 100 best during Showgirl’s debut week on the chart, and has spent most of its chart run since hanging around the top 10 — ranking at No. 10 this week.
Swift’s decision to premiere the video first on Spotify and Apple Music follows YouTube’s December announcement that it was withdrawing its streaming data from all of Billboard‘s charts. YouTube’s withdrawal followed Billboard‘s Dec. 16 announcement of a change to chart methodology that will continue to weigh subscription streams more favorably than ad-supported streams, in a bid to better reflect changing consumer behaviors and the increased revenue derived from streaming in the industry. (The change means that paid/subscription streams will be weighted against ad-supported streams at a 1:2.5 ratio, narrowed from the previous 1:3 ratio.)
Swift and her fans would no doubt love to see “Opalite” top the chart, giving Showgirl its second No. 1 hit on the Hot 100, following lead single “The Fate of Ophelia” reigning for a career-best 10 total weeks between late 2025 and early 2026. Swift has racked up a stunning 13 No. 1 hits on the chart since she first led in 2012 — leading Drake, by one, for the most among all artists over that timespan — but, in the past decade (since reputation in 2017), they’ve all come from different albums. Her last LP to generate multiple No. 1 hits was her epochal 2014 blockbuster 1989, which spun off three: “Shake It Off,” “Blank Space” and “Bad Blood” (with Kendrick Lamar).
But the competition on the Feb. 21 chart is already set to be stiff. Previous No. 1-bowing 2026 hits from Bruno Mars (“I Just Might”) and Harry Styles (“Aperture”) have receded in weekly sales and streams from their debut weeks, but are beginning to make up for it with steady radio growth (and, for Mars, a big look on Grammy night last Sunday). Ella Langley’s “Choosin’ Texas” also remains mighty on streaming and country radio — with pop radio starting to come around, as well — and Olivia Dean’s “Man I Need” remains a cross-platform smash, with Dean’s entire catalog seeing major gains following her own huge Grammys night. (The Langley and Dean hits are expected to be the primary contenders for No. 1 on next week’s Hot 100, dated Feb. 14.)
This Friday also brings with it the re-entry of a major chart force in rap superstar J. Cole. While Cole is not as familiar with the top of the Hot 100 as Swift, Mars or Styles — he’s only made it once, as a featured artist on Drake’s “First Person Shooter,” having topped out at No. 2 as a lead artist (“my.life” with 21 Savage and Morray in 2021). But he has still been an impactful presence on the Hot 100 for many years — with 13 total top 10 hits since 2016 — and new set The Fall-Off has the advantage of not only coming after years of anticipation, but being billed as Cole’s final album.
But perhaps the biggest challenger to Taylor Swift immediately scoring her second Showgirl No. 1 is Bad Bunny. The global superstar is experiencing the biggest gains of anyone from Grammy night, thanks to multiple memorable moments on stage and in the audience, and a trio of wins, including album of the year for his Billboard 200-topping 2025 set Debí Tirar Más Fotos. Bad Bunny’s whole catalog has risen as a result, with Fotos’ total streams tripling on the Monday after the Grammys (Feb. 2).
The biggest beneficiary of all Bad Bunny songs has been “DtMF,” which has since claimed the top spot on both Spotify’s and Apple Music’s daily charts. The track has averaged more than 3 million official on-demand U.S. streams a day since the Grammys, compared to “Opalite” being in the daily low 1-million range. “DtMF” could return to the Hot 100 in the top 20 or even the top 10 on next week’s chart (dated Feb. 14) — possibly higher than “Opalite,” despite the Grammy bump only impacting the final four full days of its tracking week.
And it might not even be the biggest streaming bump that “DtMF” gets this month. Even with his big night at the Grammys, Bad Bunny didn’t perform any of his songs — outside of humoring Trevor Noah with a couple bars of “DtMF” during the host’s own rendition of the song — because he was waiting to take the biggest stage of them all: Super Bowl halftime, which he’ll be headlining for the first time this Sunday (Feb. 8).
Last year, Kendrick Lamar showed the power of what can happen when one of the hottest contemporary performers in music performs at Super Bowl halftime, particularly when they’re coming off a huge Grammys night, as Lamar also was when he went 5-for-5 with “Not Like Us” in 2025. The week after the rap superstar’s Super Bowl performance, he charted 13 songs on the Hot 100, including a stunning four of the top chart’s five — with “Not Like Us,” the most buzzed-about song from his performance, returning to the top of the chart. (“Luther” with SZA, which ranked behind it at No. 2, would claim the top spot the next week and rule for 13 weeks.)
Bad Bunny could certainly be in line for a similar chart-swarming week on the Hot 100 following his own Grammys-Super Bowl back-to-back. And if he performs “DtMF” during his Super Bowl set — which, as the Grammy-nominated quasi-title track to and biggest global hit from his most recent album, seems highly probable — it could pour significantly more gasoline on the song’s already-raging fire, potentially setting it on a path to contend for the No. 1 the next week.
“Opalite” will certainly have a major radio advantage over any Bad Bunny competitor on the chart, as the song currently ranks in the top 10 on Radio Songs, while nothing from Fotos is nowhere to be found in the 50-song chart. But it will likely ultimately come down to how much the “Opalite” video can help compensate for the likely streaming gap between the two songs, and then if Swift ships enough of those vinyl 7-inches to make for a significant sales margin, as well.
Regardless, for anyone unsatisfied with the Super Bowl matchup this year, they’ll also have a likely showdown between the Billboard staff’s picks for the two Greatest Pop Stars of 2025 to look forward to.
