At midnight on 19 April last year, Taylor Swift released her 11th studio album, The Tortured Poets Department. Over 31 tracks of heartbreak and emotional longing, Swift picked at the scabs of her romances with Matty Healy and Joe Alwyn, while pushing back at social media critics and documenting the pressures of fame. The reviews were middling at best, with NME calling it a “rare misstep” and The New York Times describing it as “insular” and “self-indulgent”.
But 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, was released today and already it’s performing phenomenally well, despite mixed reviews. More than five million fans pre-saved it on Spotify, the largest number in the company’s history, and pre-orders for a special vinyl edition sold out in less than an hour.
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? More than perhaps any other current musician, Swift has transcended pop music. What sets her 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.
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, and promoted her new album with an appearance on his New Heights podcast, where she presumably had some editorial control.
