Taylor Swift’s “Eras” tour gets exclusive TikTok treatment

According to the Washington Post, Taylor Swift is on the verge of conquering one of the biggest cultural phenomena of the post-2020 era: TikTok.

The social media platform has developed an in-app experience to celebrate the pop superstar’s Eras Tour. It offers users the opportunity to add digital profile frames as well as their own in-app friendship clips as they complete challenges. TikTok users who complete tasks for 11 weeks will receive a limited edition Taylor Swift-themed profile frame.

Taylor and TikTok sitting in a tree…

The app announced the feature on Thursday, making it the latest platform to develop features tailored specifically for the singer to capitalize on her fame. In April, Instagram offered the megastar’s account a similar feature that allowed users to swipe down on her profile and bring up a secret countdown to the album “The Tortured Poets Department.” In September last year, Elon Musk asked Swift to post on X (formerly Twitter).

“I recommend Post music or concert videos directly on the X platform,” he posted.

Swift joined YouTube Shorts in 2022 and encouraged her fans to share reaction videos to her 2022 album Midnights. Exploding Topics, a San Francisco-based analytics firm, counts the singer’s followers across all social media platforms at 550 million, making her one of the five most followed people in the world.

Ari Elkins, a Gen Z music curator who has 2.2 million TikTok followers, said: “Taylor Swift is, in my opinion, the most famous person and the biggest name in the entire world right now. It makes total sense for apps and brands to associate themselves with Taylor because Taylor generates attention with everything she touches.

Even the NFL was touched by Swift’s magic when she attended games of beautiful Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce. Elkins noted that sales of NFL tickets and Kelce’s jerseys skyrocketed thanks to Swift.

Freddie Morris, a Los Angeles digital music marketer, added: “Taylor Swift is a major driver of internet culture.” Morris has collaborated with other popular artists such as Maroon 5, A$AP Rocky and Miguel. Josh Epple, vice president of streaming and promotion at Hopeless Records, meanwhile, said he is confident that TikTok will continue to promote and elevate the careers of new artists and superstars like Swift.

Democratizing becoming famous

“It’s very cool that apps like TokTok are willing to step in and serve superfans, but I hope it doesn’t come at the expense of smaller artists,” he continued. One of Epple’s artists, Dasha, released the hit song Auston, which garnered more than a billion TikTok views and hundreds of millions of streaming views.

Swift has over 32 million followers on the social media app. She previously launched a campaign on TikTok to encourage her fans to promote Tortured Poets. Since then, more than 3.1 million videos have been tagged #TheTorturedPoetsDepartment, and other tags related to the singer have also seen an uptick in engagement. The hashtag #SwiftTok has been used in over 2.6 million videos, and #TaylorsVersion has been used in more than 2.1 million videos.

Earlier this year, Swift’s music was removed from TikTok due to a dispute between the app and Universal Music Group. Universal stopped licensing her music and that of other artists signed to them to TikTok after the contract expired in January.

One day before the deadline, UMG published on its website “An Open Letter to the Artist and Songwriter Community – Why We Need to Give TikTok a Break.” In it, the music giant accused TikTok of requiring it to pay its “artists and songwriters a fraction of what similarly sized social platforms pay.”

However, Swift has the advantage over many other artists in that she owns the copyright to the music, which meant she was able to get her work back on the platform before the April 19 release of “Tortured Poets.” This contributed to the album’s online success.

In May, UMG’s catalog was back on the app after both companies settled their dispute. The social media platform’s CEO, Shou Chew, released a statement saying, “Music is an integral part of the TikTok ecosystem.”

But that’s not all: The glam band used their fame on TikTok to gain 20.5 million monthly listeners on Spotify, more than more established bands like Rammstein, Iron Maiden or Metallica.

And then there’s Tyla. The South African singer and songwriter behind Water peaked at number 21 on the Billboard Hot 100 with her song. The artist worked with her choreographer to develop dance moves that included belly dancing and twerking. She performed this during her concerts and posted the video on TikTok, which led to a viral dance challenge. Tyla became the youngest South African artist to chart on the Billboard Hot 100 and the first artist in 55 years to chart since Hugh Masekela’s Grazing in the Grass.

Perhaps the biggest artist to ever break out on TikTok is Lil Nas X. In just one year, he went from college dropout to an artist who had a single top the Billboard Hot 100 chart in a record-breaking 19 weeks. In 2020, he won two Grammy Awards.

While Taylor Swift may receive preferential treatment due to her superstar status, I share the hope that one day there will be an artist who started on TikTok who will receive the same treatment that arguably the biggest name in pop culture is currently receiving.