In every sense, Taylor Swift is an outlier. This week her Eras Tour film became the highest-grossing concert film in box office history, taking the record from Michael Jackson’s 2009 movie This Is It. She was the only artist who placed in the chart of the UK’s Top 10 albums of 2023 with a new album rather than an older one (albeit with a re-recording of her 2014 pop breakthrough 1989). Last year she became the first woman to have four albums in the US Top 10 at the same time, she took the record for the most US No 1 albums by a woman from Barbra Streisand, the Eras tour became the first ever to earn more than $1bn, and in October Swift herself was estimated to have become a billionaire. In November, a US publication hired a dedicated Swift reporter – though the joke is that everyone in entertainment media pretty much does the same job, given the wild scale of her success.
But beyond commerce, Swift, 34, is also an outlier in terms of how she conducts her relationships with her fans and the public. She maintains an unusual level of control in a period when other pop superstars allow themselves to be the subjects of untrammelled interpretation and speculation – Harry Styles thrives on mystery; Beyoncé’s PR strategy appears to be never apologise, never explain – and understand how doing so might satisfy unexpected elements of one’s fanbase, or suggest surprisingly viable commercial paths. Swift rarely gives interviews – though more on that later – and her primary public relations strategy involves seeding fairly obvious clues for her fans to work out her next move, allowing them to feel like active participants in her work while almost always leading them to her desired conclusion. Puppet-mastery is a smart approach, especially for a star who tests the limits of overexposure – allowing her to remain plausibly out of the picture while perpetually in the spotlight and still on her terms.
