Taylor Swift is everywhere. It’s exactly what she wants.
Swift’s media blitz to promote her 12th album, “The Life of a Showgirl,” has emulated all facets of the performer she is. She announced the album on her fiancé Travis Kelce’s podcast “New Heights,” marking her first-ever podcast appearance. She blanketed radio stations with interviews in both the U.S. and the U.K. the weekend of the album’s release. She graced the couches of her late night staples Graham Norton and Jimmy Fallon. She announced the theatrical companion to the album, “Taylor Swift: The Official Release Party of a Showgirl,” only two weeks ahead of its Oct. 3 release date, and it promptly won its sole box office weekend with $33 million.
The campaign is ostensibly in pursuit of achieving one goal: the highest first-week sales for an album in the United States. The record was previously held by Adele’s “25,” which debuted in late 2015 with 3.48 million copies sold in its first week. Swift’s “Showgirl” moved 3.5 million units in its first five days, with 3.2 million copies in pure sales, and estimates forecast the record may be the first album to achieve 4 million copies sold in its first week.
Swift pulled out nearly every tactic possible to reach the goal in what can only be described as a complete and total barnstorm. Her dedicated subreddit put together a spreadsheet for the nearly 30 variants of her record — including dozens of physical editions, Target-exclusive varieties and digital copies containing “original songwriting memos” and acoustic versions of some of the album’s 12 tracks, each of which provided another opportunity for her fans to buy the same album again. Spotify launched its second Swift-themed installation in support of the album. Rolling Stone plastered its entire home page for 24 hours with positive Swift coverage — including its five-star review of the record, posted just as the clock struck midnight.
Even Apple’s X account for its iTunes platform posted for the first time in six years last month to promote the album. Every tweet since then has involved “The Life of a Showgirl.”
If that sounds like a lot, well, so is Swift. The achievement is only possible due to the culture Swift has managed to create around herself throughout her nearly 20-year career, one that reached new heights after the 2014 release of her Grammy-winning album “1989.” Even after commercial and some critical declines with 2017’s “Reputation” and 2019’s “Lover,” her string of re-recorded albums, multimillion-dollar new releases and the highest-grossing tour of all time has shown how Swift has managed to fashion a monoculture out of herself in a media environment marked by fragmentation — and grow into a net worth of over $2 billion in the process.
It’s prompted fawning media coverage, corporate tie-ins to boost engagement and even journalism jobs exclusively dedicated to reporting on all things Swift. The Grammy winner has cemented a playbook that is increasingly hard for her peers to replicate. Pop music contemporaries do not maintain fan accounts anywhere near the size of her company’s Taylor Nation social media accounts (3.3 million on X, 9.7 million on Instagram, 12 million on TikTok).
Even still, Swift’s “Life of a Showgirl” explosion is no accident. The talk show sit-downs, podcast appearances and variant releases (elements common among her pop contemporaries, to be fair) are all part of a strategy that the singer-songwriter has honed over her last several albums, leading to the record-shattering performance of the last week.
The album’s mixed critical and fan response compared to her past releases also doesn’t seem to bother her, as her pursuit doesn’t seem tailored to garner praise. Instead, she admitted in an interview earlier this week that she’s working to strengthen her business.
“I welcome the chaos,” she told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe of the divided takes on her latest. “The rule of show business is if it’s the first week of my album release and you are saying either my name or my album title, you’re helping.”
Such a run is only possible, of course, when the consummate performer is also the face of a business — 13 Management, named after her favorite number — whose purpose is to successfully sell its sole brand: Taylor Swift.
A spokesperson for Swift did not respond to a request for comment.
How we got here
Swift has always worked to create moments out of her album releases, from the two-year-long campaign for “1989” to clearing her social media accounts ahead of “Reputation.”
But 2019’s “Lover” marked a return to the monthslong marketing campaigns Swift was used to, bringing her everywhere from the cover of Rolling Stone to “The Voice” to the stages of an Amazon Prime-branded concert and a small venue in Paris for a “City of Lover”-themed show. Target, always a partner in all things Taylor Swift, sold four different deluxe box sets of the album.
“The ‘Lover’ rollout was an old-school music-industry blitzkrieg,” Rolling Stone wrote in 2020. “Turn on the TV, open your streaming service of choice, even order a package that has nothing to do with music whatsoever — there she was.”
Yet, despite mostly favorable reviews, “Lover” became Swift’s first record to sell fewer than a million copies (867,000) in its first week since 2009’s “Fearless” — though it did move 679,000 physical copies, a notable achievement in the dawn of the streaming era — and speculation began about whether Swift’s imperial run had come to an end.
“Its something-for-everyone approach feels like consolidation, not progress, designed to keep Swift as one of the world’s biggest stars without provoking the kind of backlash that led her to start evoking the end of days in her diary,” the Guardian wrote in its review.
Eleven months after the August 2019 release of “Lover” came an apparent course correction: “folklore,” Swift’s 2020 folk-inspired album that came out within 18 hours of her announcement and no pre-release singles, a first for an artist who treated past singles (the girl groups of “Bad Blood,” the various Taylor eras in “Look What You Made Me Do”) like events.
But that didn’t stop her pursuit of chart success. In the spirit of her eighth album, Swift sold eight versions it (eight vinyls, eight CDs) with different cover artwork on her website ahead of its release, along with bundling digital versions of the record with “folklore”-themed merchandise, taking advantage of since-sunset Billboard chart rules.
It worked: The critically adored record sold 846,000 copies in its first week, 612,000 of which were physical pre-orders of the album (as vinyl shipments were delayed due to production shortages); broke streaming records worldwide; drew the best sales week since the debut of “Lover” and produced the best-selling album of 2020 in the U.S.
Swift replicated the album’s commercial and critical success with her late-2020 release, “evermore,” which also debuted with 12 hours’ notice and no singles released ahead of its arrival. While it sold less than “folklore” in its first week (329,000), once its vinyls came out in June 2021, it recorded the highest sales week for vinyl records since analytics firm Luminate (then MRC Data) began tracking album sales in 1991. Both albums were nominated for album of the year at the Grammys in 2021 and 2022, respectively, with “folklore” becoming Swift’s third win in the category.
Through these critically lauded and, comparatively, promotionally muted eras, Swift was able to reset her public relationship with marketing while softly revving it up for her subsequent eras.
Back to full-throttle
Swift’s first re-recorded album, “Fearless (Taylor’s Version),” pulled tools out of her past playbook and drew the biggest sales week for a country album since 2015 and the highest debut of any re-recorded album when it came out in April 2021. Its success (291,000) allowed Swift to embark on her first full-blitz marketing campaign in years with her second 2021 re-record, “Red (Taylor’s Version),” a new version of an album considered one of her best that featured 30 songs.
The album’s November 2021 release saw Swift blanket culture, with appearances on all of NBC’s late night shows (she hit “The Tonight Show,” “Late Night” and “Saturday Night Live” across five days), collaborations with Starbucks and pandemic favorite Peloton, and the release of her “All Too Well: The Short Film,” an extended music video for the highly requested 10-minute version of her fan-favorite track “All Too Well.”
That version of “All Too Well,” which saw variants of it come out throughout release week, dethroned Don McLean’s “American Pie” to become the longest-running No. 1 single on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and made Swift the first artist to thrice debut a No. 1 song and No. 1 album on Billboard’s respective charts in their first week. The album sold 605,000 copies and beat the record set by “folklore” for the most-streamed album by a female artist in its first day.
After a period of relative silence save for a few public appearances, including a commencement speech at New York University’s 2022 graduation ceremony, Swift announced her 10th album, “Midnights.” Its lyrics, it turned out, were sprinkled throughout her commencement speech, highlighting a subliminal marketing endeavor.
The album’s marketing campaign — devoid of any interviews or singles — showed Swift’s ability to tap into her fans’ purchasing power without releasing any music to lure them in, unlike her past re-recorded releases where they knew nearly every song ahead of time. Swift sold eight different vinyl and CD versions (four for each medium) of the record, along with cassettes, and encouraged fans to buy them all to form a clock for their wall. (Ever one to look out for her fans, she also sold a $49 set for them.)
“Midnights” also gave Swift her first opportunity to take up the entire top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100, prompting her to sell instrumental versions of some album tracks to make the cut. “Midnights” ultimately became the first album since her 2017 “Reputation” to sell 1 million copies in its first week, selling 1.58 million copies.
The album also became the vessel for Swift’s largest promotional tool, her two-year-long Eras Tour — the only tour to gross more than $2 billion. During her 2023 U.S. run, she announced the re-releases of her albums “Speak Now” and “1989,” and used the downtime between tour legs to extensively promote the latter’s re-release through another 11 variants. While the re-recorded “Speak Now” sold 716,000 copies in its first week, the re-recorded “1989” managed to sell more than 1.6 million copies in its October 2023 release week, trouncing the debut weeks of “Midnights” and even the original “1989” nine years earlier. The tour’s concert film, “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour,” became the highest-grossing concert film of all time after its run in 2023, earning $267.1 million at the box office.
Swift’s unimpeachable playbook continued with her 2024 release, “The Tortured Poets Department,” which she announced as she accepted Grammys for “Midnights” that year. The album — through 19 physical variants, including four distinct versions of the album that each contained a unique bonus track, that documented facets of Swift’s two public break-ups in 2023 — sold 2.6 million copies in its first week, a Swift record and a reflection of the work she put in to expand her sales reach. (Many more variants to keep the album afloat on the charts would follow.)
What’s next
Such “chaos,” as Swift put it, is likely to continue.
On her final set of tour dates in Vancouver last year, Swift had another film crew on stage with her as she performed her three-and-a-half-hour concert, perhaps indicating an extension of her record-breaking concert film or a behind-the-scenes documentary. Swift also confirmed in June, while announcing the completion of her re-recording project, that her debut album is fully re-recorded, and its 20th anniversary is next year.
Because what is the life of a showgirl if not one of perpetual performance?
