66 1989 (Taylor’s Version) & Swiftie Consumerism
COMM 3P18 Final Paper
Caroline Candeloro
Never in my Wildest Dreams did I think Taylor Swift would be as big as she is today. As an active member of the Swiftie community for more than seven years now, I have never felt more connected and proud to express my love for Taylor Swift’s music and her accomplishments. She will Never Go Out of Style, especially as her passion for songwriting grows and she keeps releasing new music… or re-releasing old music.
Taylor Swift has been releasing music for 17 years now. Therefore, she has a good idea of how the industry works. With her debut album released in 2006, she continues to build an empire and has unequivocally become one of the most influential artists in history. Call It What You Want, but Swift’s success illustrates hard work and perseverance, even when rocky. Still, the power of her dedicated fanbase, the Swifties, has inherited her extreme global status. The Swifties bear as much power as Taylor Swift at this point.
I did not choose to write a paper on my evident End Game love for Taylor Swift just because I want to talk about her (which is ironic considering I keep using song puns), nor am I trying to start any Bad Blood with Swift and be critical of her career. Still, I am fascinated with Swift’s undeniable growth in the past couple of years, especially in 2023 due to her tremendous history-making tour, The Eras Tour (a concert I had to put blood, sweat, and tears into getting tickets for). However, with Swift’s superb success this past year, I wanted to talk about one of the biggest global fandoms right now as a compeer, Swiftie. Deconstructing a fanbase from someone who knows how the fanbase works might give a different insight that an outsider might never disclose.
However, besides the Eras Tour, another unique and unexpected element has brought the spotlight onto Swift: her decision to re-record and re-release her first six albums. This re-recording process for Swift has also garnered colossal success, especially her most recent re-release of her iconic and career-breaking album, 1989 (Taylor’s Version), the original album released in 2014. This album re-release has been Swift’s most successful re-release thus far, with this album breaking records and maintaining the Billboard charts. Like all other re-releasing of Swift’s albums, there is an extensive marketing plan consisting of social media posts and merchandise that come before and after the official release of the re-recorded album, which, in this case, the official re-release date was October 27, 2023. Like any other artist releasing a new album, Swift promotes her version of the re-recorded albums like all her other albums. A typical pattern for Swift’s re-release announcements has been noted for all four re-recorded albums (Fearless, RED, Speak Now and now 1989), and that usually starts with Swift dropping hints or ‘easter eggs’ in other projects or social media posts, leading her fans