This week, Taylor Swift teased the release of her 12th studio album, The Life of a Showgirl, through a clip from today’s episode of New Heights, the podcast hosted by her boyfriend, NFL player Travis Kelce, and his brother, former NFL player Jason Kelce. When the clip went up, the internet erupted into a familiar frenzy—one that we’ve come to know all too well.
What’s interesting about this particular album announcement, however, is that for someone as famous as she is, Swift actually lays pretty low. The 35-year-old singer rarely agrees to interviews and she’s reportedly never appeared on a video podcast—until now.
Though there are many strategies Swift uses to command our attention, from easter eggs to community building, one strategy in particular stands out with this album announcement. Swift touched on it in the last public interview she gave back in 2023, when Time magazine chose her as its Person of the Year. She says it all goes back to the 2009 VMAs, when she learned that record labels were trying to replace her after Kanye West interrupted her acceptance speech.
Her response? “I thought instead I’d replace myself first with a new me,” Swift says. “It’s harder to hit a moving target.”
That strategy led Swift to experiment with different kinds of music, bending genres and storytelling methods over the course of the past decade and a half. It also seems to underpin her promotional strategy for the Taylor Swift brand.
When almost everything Swift does is so meticulously planned, slight changes feel like groundbreaking shifts. So when she decides to do something unexpected, like re-record her albums before buying them all back, like she did 12 weeks ago in May, or appear on a podcast, her audience is hooked.
The excitement around this week’s announcement continued when Swift launched a curated Spotify playlist featuring 22 of her songs, starting with “22” off of her album Red, with a runtime of one hour and 22 minutes. Fans were quick to point out that each of the songs are produced by Max Martin and Shellback, hypothesizing the duo produced this upcoming project. Jack Antonoff, a co-producer and co-writer on Swift’s past 11 releases, and whose wedding Swift attended last summer, appears to be missing from the credits.
Fans expect Swift, like all artists, to release new music. But Swift’s unexpected moves and manufactured guessing games seem key to how she continues to keep the world entranced. It’s not unlike the strategy that has consumers feverishly collect limited edition Stanley Cups and Labubus.
As Inc.com columnist Bill Murphy wrote about Swift’s strategy during her last album announcement, “In short, never let the story end. When you’ve got your fans’ attention, always make sure to have something else to announce that they look forward to.”
— By Ava Levinson
This article originally appeared on Fast Company’s sister publication, Inc.
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