Online Reporter
NEW YORK. — At midnight on 19 April last year, Taylor Swift released her 11th studio album, The Tortured Poets Department.
It was an emotional garage sale.
Over 31 tracks of heartbreak and emotional longing, Swift picked at the scabs of her romances with the rock star Matty Healy and actor Joe Alwyn, while pushing back at social media critics and documenting the pressures of fame.
The reviews were middling at best.
Music magazine NME suggested it was a “rare misstep” for Swift, with some “cringe-inducing” lyrics. The New York Times described it as “insular” and “self-indulgent”.
My own review bemoaned the lack of editing, calling Swift “prolific to a fault”.
Others were more complimentary— Rolling Stone called the album “gloriously chaotic” – though the response clearly didn’t match the near-universal acclaim of Swift’s earlier work.
But guess what? Those tepid reviews didn’t matter.
Spotify declared it their most-streamed album in a single day. In the UK, it enjoyed the biggest first-week sales in seven years.
Right now, it seems nothing can damage Swift.
Her newest album, The Life of a Showgirl, is released tomorrow and it’s difficult to see any way that it doesn’t perform phenomenally well.
More than five million fans have pre-saved it on Spotify (the largest number in the company’s history) and pre-orders for a special vinyl edition sold out from Swift’s online shop in less than an hour.
And that’s all before they’ve heard it.
Swift, at 35, appears to have become too big to fail.
Her place as one of the all-time greats is assured. But can her hot streak continue, as public taste shifts towards “messier” singers who are more upfront about their vulnerabilities?
Water-tight image control
More than perhaps any other current musician, Swift has transcended pop music.
It’s not just that she is big – other stars, like Michael Jackson and Madonna sold more records than her (albeit before the streaming era chipped away at sales figures).
What sets Swift apart is that she has escaped the confines of the music industry itself, building her own universe around her.
Through painful negotiation she won ownership over her creative rights, meaning she is not reliant on record labels the way many other artists are.
And she has cultivated an army of ultra-loyal ‘Swifties’ – tens of millions of fans who are almost guaranteed to download her latest release, regardless of what critics say.
“She has built this empire around her where no one can tell her what to do except Taylor herself,” says Tatiana Cirisano, a music analyst at MIDiA consultancy.
But at the core of Swift’s success is a water-tight control over her public image.
She has not given an in-depth interview to a mainstream magazine since 2023, when she spoke to Time after they named her Person of the Year. It means the only things fans learn about her come directly from her – whether her social media posts or details they glean from her lyrics.
She announced her recent engagement – to American footballer Travis Kelce – on her own Instagram too; and promoted her new album with an appearance on his New Heights podcast, where she presumably had some editorial control.
“It’s very in character for her to be making these announcements directly – not filtered through anyone else,” says Annie Zaleski, a music historian and author of Taylor Swift: The Stories Behind the Songs.
Swift has always valued having a direct pipeline to her fans. Ms Zaleski says it is part of a communications style that dates back to Swift’s days as a teenage country singer in Nashville, when she built an audience on the early social platform MySpace and, later, Tumblr.
“From a very young age, she has cultivated a really accessible online persona.”
Swift may well be following the path set by her friend and contemporary Beyoncé, who in the 2010s largely removed herself from the media and asserted control over her own image, through meticulously-planned album campaigns and documentaries that construct her mythology. – BBC.
