Eight million Swifties were out in force Wednesday night as their hero appeared on the Kelce brothers’ podcast to dish on her new Life of a Showgirl album, buying back her master tapes, how she met boyfriend Travis Kelce, her football knowledge and much more.
It was a rare Swift appearance on a podcast and she showed a more personal side than fans are used to seeing, even sharing an on-screen kiss with Travis late in the show, to which brother Jason said: “Oh my gosh, alright.”
Swift had already done a preview of the reveal on August 12 at 12:12 a.m. The album will be officially released on October 3.
Some members of the PRWeek newsroom followed the drama move by move and were locked in to every step. Others … not so much.
But however personally invested you are in the reveal, which had the internet literally breaking on Wednesday night due to the weight of people accessing the stream, it’s a perfect example of the way messages are communicated directly to target audiences nowadays, rather than through third-party disintermediation such as the mainstream media.
Swift now owns her music, acts as her own record company in a partnership with Republic Records, owns the rights to her masters, films, videos, art and photography and leads marketing from the front through reveals such as the Kelce tie-in. The old feudal relationship between a record company and an artist, in which the latter is contractually tied to the former, often to their detriment, is over.
And the reveal still received blanket coverage from mainstream media anyway, as every detail of the podcast was scrutinized in minute detail for Swift obsessives to football fans to casual observers of both worlds.
Popeyes, FedEx, Dunkin’ and Buffalo Wild Wings were among the brands aligning with the Swift album reveal.
Apropos of nothing in particular, it was ironic that the Swiftie reveal happened around the same time AOL got rid of its dial-up internet service after a 35-year run. Favored by parents of a certain era, including mine, the service was famous for its “you’ve got mail” tagline.
In the early days of email I recall people sitting in front of their computer waiting for those three words to ring out as a message arrived. Oh, that it was so simple nowadays, with our inboxes bombarded with hundreds of emails a day and keeping on top of them all virtually impossible.
The now Yahoo-owned company said it was ending the service at the end of September as it continues to “innovate to meet the needs of today’s digital landscape.”
From “you’ve got mail” to “you’ve got Taylor,” the media and technological landscape that communicators and journalists operate within is changing constantly, and that pace of change will never get slower.
Taylor Swift and the Kelce brothers are giving us a taste of the new media landscape that requires a whole new approach from communicators and brands that want to align. There are exciting, if a little daunting, times ahead.
