The music industry saw what will likely be its biggest album release of the year last Friday with Taylor Swift’s new album “The Tortured Poets Department”.

The project immediately became record-breaking:

• the album became the most pre-saved countdown page in Spotify history

• the album became the most streamed album in a single day in Spotify history (300 million streams)

• her song Fortnite ft Post Malone became the most streamed song in a single day in Spotify’s history

• the album became the first album in Spotify history to reach 1 billion streams in a single week

• Taylor Swift became the most streamed artist in a day in Spotify history

• the album became the biggest pop album of all time by first-day streams on Apple Music

• Taylor Swift became the first artist in history to chart 44 songs simultaneously in US Apple Music’s top 50 charts

• the album sold 1.4 million units in its first day

• of those 1.4 million units, 700,000 were vinyl - breaking the record for the largest sales week for an album on vinyl

What Taylor Swift is doing is groundbreaking, monumental, and game-changing. Guess whose records she broke with this new album? That’s right…her own. “Midnights” and “1989 (Taylor’s Version)” are the other two most streamed albums in a single day in Spotify’s history and the previous vinyl record was set by her.

Part of Taylor Swift’s success is her immense dedication to the fanbase she’s cultivated throughout her career. I thought it’d be fun to break down the different marketing elements of the new album rollout and what helped contribute to its success.

This newsletter highlights:

• Taylor Swift’s “The Tortured Poets Department” album rollout

Let’s dive in ⬇️ 

The initial announcement

What better way to announce a new album than when accepting a Grammy? While accepting the Grammy for Best Pop Vocal Album at this year’s Grammy Awards, Taylor Swift announced her new album live on air and immediately posted the cover artwork afterward (February 4th).

The announcement gave her a 10-week runway to raise awareness. It’s a smart move for a superstar like Taylor Swift - the long lead time gave her ample runway to get fans excited and build momentum however it would be harder to pull off for an emerging artist with how short people’s attention spans are.

Swift is big enough to capture and hold people’s attention for almost 2 months (while announcing on one of the biggest stages in the world). For an emerging artist though (even if they’re somewhat established), holding their audience’s attention for such a long period becomes much harder.

The runway

On February 16th, Taylor Swift started launching pre-orders for the album on her website along with an exclusive bonus track. The post served as another way to bring people back to the album and drive pre-sales.

One week later, on February 23rd, Swift made another pre-order post, this time with a different bonus track available (The Albatross) to continue driving pre-sales.

The same thing happened on March 3 with bonus song “The Black Dog”.

Social media engagement

Despite how massive Taylor Swift’s following on social media is, she surprisingly didn’t post a ton leading up to the album release.

That said, she did engage in multiple ways.

1) A few days ahead of the album release, Swift posted a “Timetable” announcing a music video release at 8 pm EST on release day. The announcement helped fuel excitement towards the new project and ensured her fans were tuned into the video release.

The video also teased her 2 AM deluxe edition drop with the clock on the wall showing 2.

2) She partnered with Instagram, highlighting the new project at the top of her profile with a special Threads promotion.

On desktop, there is a big banner at the top of her profile with the album name.

When clicked it directs to her Threads profile. (Pre-release had a countdown to the album release).

3) Much has been made in recent weeks over the conversation of some of Taylor Swift’s music returning to TikTok despite the platform’s dispute with UMG.

TikTok supported the new album in a big way with a custom profile frame that fans can unlock, banners, custom playlists, in-app banners, and more. The custom profile frame had call to actions for fans to follow Taylor Swift’s profile, Taylor Nation, & more.

DSPs

Taylor Swift engaged with the different streaming platforms to celebrate the release and do something special.

1) Spotify

Their collaboration included a pop-up library installation at The Grove, Los Angeles. The installation was open to the public for the 3 days leading up to the album release on April 19th and created a ton of social media chatter.

Taylor Swift’s Spotify pre-release strategy also included a pre-save countdown landing page for the album ahead of release that ended up breaking Spotify’s record for most presaves from a countdown page.

2) Apple Music

Swift helped curate playlists based on the “five stages of heartbreak”. Clues about the new album were also hidden in the lyrics to existing songs that fans could discover and incentivize them to listen to the older catalog.

Out of home

The week of the album release, massive posters appeared on buildings in different cities with mysterious QR codes - when scanned, these QR codes led to hidden YouTube Shorts on Taylor Swift’s YouTube channel that typed out cryptic letters.

Consumption

While giving her fans an amazing experience, Swift also set her release up for success in the streaming world in a few ways.

• At 2am EST, just 2 hours after the initial release of the album, Swift released a deluxe version of the album with 15 additional songs. The additional songs brought the total deluxe album count to 31 songs. In the age of streaming, longer albums helped tally more streams and ultimately album equivalents.

• A less obvious tactic was making the lyric videos for the album available on her YouTube channel at 8pm EST Friday night as opposed to 12am EST Friday when the album initially released. Setting audio videos on YouTube live in conjunction with an album release is common practice so fans can listen on YouTube from the artist’s official account upon release.

In what was most likely an effort to encourage fans listening on streaming services instead of YouTube, Swift held off on making the music available on her YouTube channel for a full 18 hours.

The net result is Swift is on pace to sell 2.3 million records first week - a staggering number considering the streaming age we’re in.

With the release of this new album, we’re definitely watching history in the making.

Thanks for reading, until next time.