Folklore Vinyl Variants: All Eight Covers and Colors Explained (and Which Are Rare)

The table lists every official folklore vinyl edition, grouped by edition rather than by factory. Most editions were pressed twice: once by MPO in France for the US store (a "Made in France" sticker on the shrink) and once in the Czech Republic for the European stores. Where the two factories produced visibly different colors, both are named. The last column is how many Discogs users have logged a copy, summed across both pressings: it is not a pressing figure (neither Republic nor the webstore ever published one) but it is the best public signal of how many copies are out there.

Two rows sit outside the numbered set. The red "Meet Me Behind The Mall" is a retail copy with the same artwork as edition No. 3 but a different color and its own catalog number, sold in November 2020 with a Target hype sticker. The last row gathers the "In The Trees" represses, which have kept the standard edition in shops since 2021 on beige, beige marbled, gold and brown marbled vinyl. If you are counting variants for a checklist, the honest answer is eight numbered editions, nine distinct jacket-and-color combinations from 2020, and at least four repress colors since.

folklore was announced on 23 July 2020 and released digitally the next day. The physical editions went up on Taylor Swift's webstore at the same time, as preorders, and the Discogs notes for each edition record the same rule: available to preorder from 23 July for one week only. Copies shipped in November 2020, four months after the album came out.

Each edition has its own front cover, back cover, photographs and artwork, and its own record color. The names come from lyrics and imagery on the album:

• No. 1 "In The Trees": brown. The standard edition, the only one that was not a one-week collector's edition.
• No. 2 "In The Weeds": teal on the US pressing, blue on the European one.
• No. 3 "Meet Me Behind The Mall": gray.
• No. 4 "Betty's Garden": purple in the US, lavender in Europe.
• No. 5 "Stolen Lullabies": green.
• No. 6 "Hide and Seek": azure in the US, blue in Europe.
• No. 7 "Running Like Water": silver.
• No. 8 "Clandestine Meetings": pink.

All eight are 2LP gatefolds with printed inner sleeves, and all carry "the lakes" as the bonus track on side D, so the deluxe tracklist is not what separates them. The difference is entirely visual: jacket, photographs and vinyl color. That is why vinyl variants of this kind are a collecting category of their own rather than a question of sound.

People searching for the "folklore deluxe vinyl" usually mean one of two things, and it helps to separate them. On the 2020 vinyl, "deluxe" is simply the 2LP set with "the lakes", and every edition, including the standard brown "In The Trees", is that set. There is no separate single-LP folklore without the bonus track among the official releases on Discogs.

The other confusion is the red copy. In November 2020 a red "Meet Me Behind The Mall" appeared in US retail, with the artwork of the gray webstore edition No. 3, catalog number B0032823-01 on the rear cover and spine, and a Target hype sticker. It is a genuine Republic release, not a recolor of the gray one, and it has since been repressed in Canada. Because it uses the same jacket as No. 3, sellers sometimes list it as "Meet Me Behind The Mall edition" without the color. If the listing photo shows a red record, it is the retail copy; the gray one was the one-week webstore edition.

Beware of anything called "folklore: the long pond studio sessions" on vinyl. The Disney+ concert album was released digitally, and the vinyl copies that Discogs lists under that title are flagged as unofficial releases. Our Taylor Swift fake-or-real checklist covers how to spot them.

This is the single most useful fact for anyone buying second-hand. Only No. 1 "In The Trees" has been pressed again. Discogs lists represses in July 2021 (beige marbled, made in the USA), 2021 (beige opaque, Czech Republic), January 2022 (gold, Czech Republic and a visually identical Canadian run), 2023 (gold, brown marbled and beige) and as recently as 2025 (beige opaque). The red retail copy was also repressed, in Canada, before 2024.

The seven one-week editions, Nos. 2 to 8, have no represses on Discogs as of 12 October 2026, apart from a numbered 2021 China edition of No. 3 "Meet Me Behind The Mall" with an obi strip and a brooch for early buyers. That matters for value in a simple way: a record that is still being pressed cannot become scarce, and a record that was sold for seven days six years ago is not getting any more common.

If you own a brown "In The Trees" from 2020, check the year: the 2020 brown pressings from MPO France are listed separately on Discogs from the beige, gold and brown marbled represses, and the original brown is the one collectors of the first run look for. Our guide to original pressings versus reissues explains why that distinction carries over to modern records.

The jacket tells you most of it: each edition has a different front photograph and the edition name printed on it. When the jacket is missing, damaged or the record has been swapped into the wrong sleeve, use these checks in order:

• Catalog number on the spine and back cover. The US editions run in sequence: B0032752-01 is No. 1, B0032753-01 is No. 2 and so on up to B0032759-01 for No. 8. The red retail copy is B0032823-01.
• Barcode on the European pressings. They follow the same order, from 6 02435 03488 1 for "In The Trees" to 6 02435 03495 9 for "Clandestine Meetings".
• Vinyl color. Useful but not decisive on its own, because the US and European pressings of Nos. 2, 4 and 6 differ in shade, and Discogs notes that the US "In The Weeds" looks blue in photographs but is teal in the hand.
• Runout. Every 2020 edition carries 00602435034881, the standard number, followed by RKS STERLING, so the runout confirms an official Sterling-cut pressing but cannot tell you the edition. The red retail copy is different: its runout reads B0032752-01-LP01 with REI, JN-H and STERLING.

The catalog number guide and runout guide go into reading those fields on any record.

Nobody published pressing quantities for any edition, so any claim that "only 5,000 were made" is a guess. What can be measured is how many collectors log a copy on Discogs. As of 12 October 2026, summed across the US and European pressings:

• No. 7 "Running Like Water" (silver): 5,765, the fewest of the eight.
• No. 5 "Stolen Lullabies" (green): 6,592.
• No. 6 "Hide and Seek" (azure/blue): 6,875.
• No. 3 "Meet Me Behind The Mall" (gray) and No. 8 "Clandestine Meetings" (pink): about 7,200 each.
• No. 4 "Betty's Garden": 7,999; No. 2 "In The Weeds": 9,073.
• Against that, No. 1 "In The Trees" (brown, 2020): 77,704, and the red retail copy: 39,556.

The seven webstore editions are therefore within a narrow band of each other, and each is logged roughly ten times less often than the standard brown copy. The individual pressing with the fewest logged copies is the European "Running Like Water", at 1,285. If you are asking which folklore vinyl is rarest, it is "Running Like Water", and the European copy of it in particular.

We are not publishing price figures on this page. eBay hides completed sales behind a login, so we could not take a dated sample of sold listings, and we do not reuse Discogs marketplace prices. What the data above does support is a ranking of what should hold value and what should not:

• Holds value: the seven one-week editions, because supply ended in July 2020 and none has been repressed. Sealed copies with the hype sticker and the "Made in France" (US) or Czech (EU) shrink intact are the version collectors compare.
• Holds some value: the original 2020 brown "In The Trees" and the 2020 red retail copy, which are first pressings of records that were later pressed again.
• Tracks retail: the beige, gold and brown marbled represses of "In The Trees". They are still made, so their price is capped by what a new copy costs.

Condition matters as much as the edition: a seam split or a bent corner on a one-week edition costs more than the difference between two editions. Grade before you list or buy, using the vinyl grading guide, and compare against completed sales, not asking prices.

Three checks cover most of the risk. First, match the catalog number or barcode to the edition named in the listing; a red record sold as "Meet Me Behind The Mall edition" at a webstore-edition price is the commonest mix-up. Second, ask for a photo of the runout: anything without 00602435034881 and RKS STERLING (or, for the red copy, B0032752-01 and STERLING) is not a 2020 official pressing. Third, treat any "folklore long pond studio sessions vinyl" as unofficial.

If you only want to listen, buy a current "In The Trees" repress: it is the same 2LP tracklist with "the lakes", and the collector premium on the numbered editions buys a cover and a color, not better sound. VinylAI can identify the release from a photo of the cover or label and match it to its Discogs entry; it cannot see the color of a record inside sealed shrink, so for sealed copies the barcode sticker is what settles the edition. For the wider picture of Taylor Swift on vinyl, start with our guide to every Taylor Swift vinyl variant, and compare with the evermore vinyl variants, folklore's sister album.