Beth Garrabrant
Taylor Swift is known for her Easter eggs and fun promotions. The release of her newest album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” raised some intense buzz, especially with a major promotional week after such a short time between announcement and release.
On February 4, Swift unexpectedly announced that her next album would be released on April 19. From then, the promotions for the album were fired off one by one.
The next day, Swift’s Instagram posted a track list for the album. The list included collaborators on certain songs—Post Malone and Florence & the Machine. There are also four different versions of the album. “The Manuscript,” “The Albatross,” “The Black Dog,” and “The Bolter” title both the album version and the bonus track included, but it does not appear that there will be an album with all four bonus tracks included.
Later, Swift created five playlists on Apple Music that coincided with the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Each playlist name was based on song titles and lyrics from TTPD. Then Apple Music did a digital scavenger hunt as a countdown to the release. “A word a day til the @taylorswift13 album drops,” the music service wrote in its bio on X (formerly Twitter).
The Grove, a shopping outlet in Los Angeles, featured a poetry library between April 16th and 18th, “highly curated to represent the new record,” according to the Grove’s event webpage. There were also Easter eggs everywhere that led to clues about TTPD.
TTPD sales have already broken several records, and it has only been out for seven days as of this writing. These include:
Spotify’s Most Pre-Saved Countdown
Apple Music Pop Albums (first-day streams)
Single-Day Spotify Song Streams
While “Swifties” sit on the edge of their seat, waiting for the Chairman of the Tortured Poets Department to drop more music, Swift is a promotional mastermind. Love her or hate her, she knows how to set the stage for breaking records over and over again.
