Taylor Swift is without a doubt one of the most successful artists on the planet. Since signing with Sony at the tender age of 14 (she was the youngest signing in the company’s history), Swift has managed to outdo herself with every album released, and amassed an alleged $450 million fortune in the process. Her new album Midnights was released on October 21, 2022, and is already a runaway hit. So how does she do it? Here’s what the experts say.
Surprise, surprise—Midnights is Swift’s most successful release so far, which is saying something. The album immediately took all of the top 10 spots on the Billboard Hot 100, and broke streaming records. “The results speak for themselves. She’s as popular as she’s ever been,” says Berklee College of Music’s music business professor George Howard. “She creates this kind of frenzy among a significant amount of fans.”
Swift isn’t afraid to try different genres, from indie to rock to pop and more. “She has been utterly successful at expressing herself through various genres of authentic songwriting and fan engagement,” says New York University Steinhardt’s director of music business program Larry Miller. “She is as truthful a storyteller and creative artist, as she is an authentic person with respect to the way that she engages with her fans. I think that she’s proven that over and over and over again.”
Swift’s fan base, known as Swifties, are amongst some of the most loyal fans on the planet. “She’s a very very smart marketer in terms of keeping her distance from her fans but still making them feel connected to her by putting these clues out there … and it feels like a dialogue,” Howard says about the way Swift interacts with her fans.
Swift announced her first tour in five years, and fans are understandably excited, enduring long lines to buy tickets online. “As someone in her place, she needs to have a kind of consistent drip approach to keep herself in the public eye. Touring is the traditional way of doing that. When you’re on the road it’s not just the live shows, it’s the halo around that,” Howard says.
Swift is worth $450 million at the age of 32—and the sky’s the limit, with Midnights already breaking records. “It’s actually, it’s a concept record, but it’s my first directly autobiographical album in a while because the last album that I put out was a re-record of my album Red,” Swift told host Jimmy Fallon. “So that has some space, you know. I wrote that stuff a decade ago. Folklore and Evermore, it was like story time. It was mythology. … I’m feeling overwhelmed by the fans’ love for the record. I’m also feeling very soft and fragile. The two can exist at once.”