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Taylor Swift Releases ‘Midnights’

Posted on by mvbraze

“Dear Reader”, the autumnal weather has arrived here in Clemson and so has Taylor Swift, as she released her 10th studio album, Midnights (at midnight) on October 21st.

The news of Midnights was a surprise for fans as Swift is currently in the middle of re-recording her first 6 albums. The impetus of re-recording these albums was a dispute regarding her masters, ultimately, the rights to them were stripped from her. Swift has released two re-recorded albums thus far (See our blog post on her re-release of RED).

The roll out of Midnights is unique from the last two new albums Swift released, Folklore and Evermore. Both of which she completely surprised fans with as they had little to no promotion. Whereas Midnights was a highly anticipated album for Swifties everywhere. Swift announced the release of this album at the 2022 VMA awards, while accepting one of three awards she won that evening. The promotion of of this album was full of surprises, in typical Taylor fashion. Swift leaned into fan theories, or as swifties would call “easter eggs” through various social media posts to announce this album, the most popular of which being “Midnights Mayhem with Me”. This short Tik Tok series announced the track titles of the songs on Midnights. Swift, the “Mastermind” she is, even had her fans tune into the 3rd quarter of the Cardinals vs Saints game on Prime’s Thursday Night Football for a special announcement – a visual album!

Midnights is an album of songs that Taylor Swift says represent different “sleepless nights” throughout her life. Writing, “I think of Midnights as a complete concept album, with those 13 songs forming a full picture of the intensities of that mystifying, mad hour”.  First, swifties were graced with 13 songs at midnight on October 21st, but as instructed through a promotional social media post earlier this week, they waited up until 3am for a ‘chaotic surprise’ which was an additional 7 songs.

Who is talking about Midnights? We took to Sprinklr to look up conversations surrounding ‘midnights’.  From October 20th to the 21st, ‘midnights’ has been mentioned over 1.2 million times, reaching over 4.8 billion users. These conversations are primarily happening on Twitter and over 50% of users are including photos in their posts. Females in the United States were the dominate participants in these conversations. In addition to fans, the top influencers include YouTube, Spotify, The NFL, and of course, Taylor Swift.

An increase in conversations began happening around 10 pm on October 20th as fans had just received the news about the visual album on Prime’s Thursday Night Football. Then conversation volume nearly doubled at midnight on the 21st as the album hit streaming services.

The album seems to be well received as the conversations are overwhelmingly positive – receiving a 76% positive sentiment score. Both fans and critics took to twitter to share their thoughts regarding the album, saying it is some of Swift’s best work and it has all the favorite parts of her previous albums in one.

The conversations surrounding Midnights have only begun as swifities received the official music video for “Anti-Hero” on Friday morning, which will be followed by more to complete the Midnights visual album. We will keep monitoring conversations, but for now we will be streaming Midnights from the Social Media Listening Center.

Author: Michelle Brazeau

Posted in Tracking News via Social Media Analytics