Taylor Swift is as a lot a drive on TikTok as she is in music. The singer’s model and relevance has solely expanded throughout her practically two-decade lengthy profession, and what units her aside from many different artists (although actually not all) is her uber-devoted fanbase—Swifties. Over the previous couple of years, Swifties have been cultivating a raucous ecosystem on TikTok, “SwiftTok.” Customers dedicate themselves to her music dialogue and, extra generally, conspiracy theories about her.
What’s SwiftTok?
Very similar to BookTok for bookreaders and CleanTok for individuals who love to wash (or watch different folks clear), SwiftTok is a neighborhood on TikTok for Swift followers and Swift content material. Taking part Swifties could discover themselves rating a few of her songs, reviewing her albums, or displaying off their vinyls. On the floor, SwiftTok looks like a typical neighborhood of impassioned followers, however diving into deeper will reveal a devoted collective that’s hellbent on dissecting each phrase out of the singer’s mouth to realize perception on her upcoming initiatives.
An intensifying “stan tradition” has helped bolster the fanbases of widespread musicians in every single place, there’s a primary distinction that separated Taylor Swift (and SwiftTok) from her contemporaries. Different fashionable, widespread musicians don’t seem to make the identical impression on TikTok that Swift does—there’s no EilishTok or TheWeekndTok. Taylor herself will generally reply to trending movies to encourage followers. Whereas a number of the content material on SwiftTok is typical music fan fodder, a number of the most prevalent content material is conspiracy theories.
What’s a Taylor Swift Easter egg?
Longtime followers of Taylor Swift don’t simply eat her music, movies, and red-carpet appearances—they dissect them with laboratory-grade precision. In a 2019 interview with Leisure Weekly, Swift defined her love for leaving hidden messages—“Easter eggs,” to borrow a time period from movie—in several types of media to her followers. “I really like to speak by means of Easter eggs,” she defined. “I believe the perfect messages are cryptic ones.” Swift’s egg-laying actually started along with her 2006 self-titled debut album—within the CD’s lyric booklet, Swift would capitalize totally different letters amongst the lyrics, which might spell out a secret message.
It wasn’t till 2017, although, when Swift started leaning in to visible Easter eggs in her music movies. “I actually began doing this in music movies far more throughout the Popularity album. I wasn’t doing interviews so I nonetheless wished a strategy to talk with the followers” she stated. “I believe essentially the most Easter egg-y video of my profession is ‘Look What You Made Me Do.’ Actually the entire video is simply an Easter egg. There’s like 1000’s of Easter eggs. There are some that individuals nonetheless haven’t discovered.”
Whereas discussions round Swift’s hints was completely current on social media platforms like Reddit and Twitter all through her profession, Swift’s enhance in posting Easter eggs, particularly in the beginning of the Lover period in spring 2019, dovetailed with the rise of TikTok in early 2020. In consequence, Swift—whether or not deliberately or not—was capable of speed up the rabidity of her fanbase into conspiracy theorists intent on perpetuating her model and identify on the quick video app.
Conspiracy theories on SwiftTok usually contain on the lookout for clues to approaching music releases on Swift’s merch or based mostly on her social media posts on a number of platforms. Latest variations of this pattern embody attempting to decode the that means behind a allure bracelet added to Swift’s merch retailer and the way her upcoming tenth studio album Midnights would possibly resurrect the long-forgotten “Tumblr aesthetic” from the early 2010’s. Extra intense and arguably invasive theorizing entails the idea that Swift is secretly part of the LGBTQ+ neighborhood—not so subtly codenamed “Gaylor”—and is just pretending to establish as straight.
What’s Taylor Swift posting on TikTok?
After Swift introduced the upcoming launch of a brand new album, Midnights, on the 2022 Video Music Awards, SwiftTok instantly started formulating theories on every part from what artists is likely to be featured on the album, to what the songs could be titled, to what style the document would dabble in. Simply the crumb of an album title and launch date led to widespread hysteria inside the TikTok area of interest.
Whereas Swift had been posting on her official TikTok account sporadically previous to the reveal of Midnights, the album announcement started Swift’s personal advertising technique on the platform. Whereas a majority of the album’s specifics have been saved at midnight, Swift started to disclose the unknown music titles separately, every with a person TikTok posted at midnight each different weekday starting on September 21. These TikToks are part of a collection that she has titled Midnights Mayhem With Me.
“I do know that I’ve a behavior of dropping cryptic clues and Easter eggs when supplying you with details about new music, and I’m not right here to disclaim that, however I’m right here to defy that,” Swift says in her first Midnights Mayhem With Me TikTok.
What SwiftTok suffers from is a transparent case of affirmation bias. As customers proceed to imagine that every part Swift says and does is an Easter egg, theories on her music will proceed to run rampant. As SwiftTok throws each puzzle piece and thought-out principle on the wall, it’s clear that one thing, finally will stick. That one-in-a-million hunch that proved to be appropriate emboldens SwiftTok to maintain digging additional and additional into the singer’s portfolio of latest appearances and social media put up captions to seek out another clues that would make them their subsequent “Eureka!” second.
It’s manipulative on Swift’s half and obsessive on SwiftTok’s half, however each events win: Swift is ready to maintain her followers engaged till the following album/single/music video drops, and SwiftTok is ready to have some enjoyable taking part in detective. Swift has essentially and ingeniously automated promoting to her loyal fanbase, as a result of they’re primarily promoting for her.
Originally published at Irvine News HQ
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