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Taylor Swift has officially started the album campaign for her tenth album, #TS10 Midnights. In true Taylor fashion the roll-out is riddled with easter eggs and has fans share their takes on potential themes, genre and single release dates.
Note: Swifties, this is not a complete timeline.
So how did it all start?
Hints have dropped for quite some time, and specifically ahead of the announcement, there was an accumulation of them. She wore earrings with an X (aka 10 in roman figures), collaborators shared posts with 10 exclamation marks when referring to Taylor’s work. Taylor herself spaced out the later revealed album title ‘m i d n i g h t’ when sharing the release of her track Carolina for the movie ‘Where Crawdads Sing’.
The biggest hint however happened inside of Walmart stores, when Taylor songs took over the stores playlist for a couple of days.
VMAs
THEN, rumours started around a Taylor Swift appearance at the VMAs, where ATW was nominated for awards. Well the rumours weren’t terrible and cruel, instead they were exactly right (at least for the appearance part, not for the performance part) – Taylor Swift made an ENTRANCE.
Previous Cottage Core aesthetics ditched, her look reminded a lot of people of her Look What You Made Me Do outfit… which kickstarted rumours flying around a rerecord of Reputation potentially coming next, after fans have been speculating for ages about which re-record will come next, and when that will be (tips were 1989 (summer) and Speak Now).
Well, it didn’t turn out to be a rerecord she’s announced. Instead – she has announced a whole new record, a concept album as it sounds, called Midnights on stage when accepting the Video Of The Year award.
Warming up the catalogue
Taylor has always been the queen of marketing, and it turns out that with her re-records and general back catalogue she is able to warm up her back catalogue easily. Rumours have been flying ahead of the TS10 announcement, which also involved Cruel Summer and the video that fans want as desperately as as they want a video for Getaway Car and as desperately as they wanted the 10 minutes version of All To Well. So not only did she enhance those Cruel Summer rumours with a couple of likes on TikTok, but now her new album is announced – it’s so cleverly done that without a first single or any of the track names it references – I’ll hand it over to Taylor herself the album is compiled by ‘the stories of 13 sleepless nights scattered throughout my life‘.
So what does that announcement do, other than giving a glimpse into what the album will be about? — WELL, it made her fanbase the Swifties go back into her full back catalogue and pull out the tracks that mentioned midnight, or even any thing close to it such as middle of the night, two am and many more and create playlists and relisten . Tumblr posts, reddit threads are dedicated to her mentioning the time, days, months, seasons and also colours.
The above depicts pretty well the mayhem that ensued…
Artwork, tracklist and consequent teasers
Shortly after the announcement on stage the artwork was revealed, showing that the record consists of Side A and B and does give of a 70s vibe (Tapestry by Carole King maybe?). With the tracklist unrevealed, and no single so far giving a hint on the genre the record is about, it could be anything. What we sort of know is that the record may be split into two parts, which could mean two narratives, two themes, two moods, POVs…
Spotify canvases were once again deployed to tease potential themes and connections to potential songs to the tracks, I will not get into that, but you can easily search for relevant theories and interpretations on TikTok
The social media teasers however could direct us to look at the clock emojis a little bit closer – because there are indications of time (dates!) and after all we’ve just been told By Taylor herself to watch the time… So watch those hands… the emojis vary (and it looks like 3rd of October could mean a single (maybe)
Other marketing ploys
Now onto why I originally started writing this – well so it seems that – a record store ‘had to take down preorders for Taylor Swift’s new album “Midnight” at the request of the label and management. The reason? The album was only going to be sold through Taylor’s official store.’ It’s a weird move, after having been the ambassador for Record Store Day just this year, so lookswise, she better does something special for them specifically also after private plane gate… Moneywise however, as it is stated on Motive Unknown, it is a clever move. She is as per usual for T Swift releasing multiple versions of her record, different artwork and by featuring the ‘clock face’ at the back of these records encouraging fans to buy all 4 special editions to be able to build a midnights Taylor Swift clock. It’s clever, it’s a bit selly, but also it’s arguably great collectible for fans (not for me but you guys go for it). A few available versions of the album below from the official store.
Final words
I’m as excited as ever to see what other great ideas, theories come out of this campaign, other than what the record will sound like. As a marketeer it’s specifically exciting to see how Taylor uses social media, and enhances very simple actions on social media by tying it so closely to her body of work. And that is literally her key to success she’s tuned in and she does things that work, and resonate with her body of work and her fans.