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Don McLean is a Swiftie.
The iconic singer-songwriter behind “American Pie” and “Vincent” recently spoke about Taylor Swift’s extraordinary success in an interview with The Standard.
McLean, whose song “American Pie (Parts I & II)” topped the Billboard Hot 100 for four weeks in 1972, is impressed by Swift’s evolution from a rising country artist to a global powerhouse.
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“She is a person who is an example of what talent and really hard work can accomplish,” McLean said, describing Swift as a “monster star, the size of the galaxy.”
McLean continued, “She’s working all of the time, and she does everything that she does better than everybody else, whether it’s a video or a performance or songwriting or records or whatever… The only thing is that she stays happy.”
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Reflecting on his own career, McLean shared, “I have a lot of interests, and they sustain me. I don’t go around thinking ‘Man, why don’t I have this?’ or ‘Why don’t I have that?’ – that is the quickest way to be unhappy I can think of.”
McLean, who has sold over 50 million records worldwide, has been honored with numerous awards, including a Grammy Hall of Fame induction for “American Pie.”
Back in 2021, Swift sent McLean a note and a bouquet of flowers after her 10-minute version of “All Too Well” surpassed his song “American Pie (Parts I & II)” as the longest song to reach No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100.
“What a classy artist!” McLean tweeted at the time, sharing Swift’s handwritten inscription that reads, “Don, I will never forget that I’m standing on the shoulders of giants. Your music has been so important to me. Sending love one writer of LONG SONGS to another. Your fan, Taylor.”
In the most recent interview, McLean also addressed the challenges Swift has faced in the music industry, particularly regarding the ownership of her early albums.
“The record companies are the biggest thieves on the planet. That was their business, stealing. You have to be very careful,” he said, referencing Swift’s legal battles to regain control of her discography from Scooter Braun, which led to her re-recording her first six studio albums.
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Donald Trump falsely claimed that Taylor Swift endorsed his presidential campaign online, sharing AI-generated images in the process.
On Sunday (Aug. 18), Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump shared a post on his Truth Social network that he cited as an endorsement from Taylor Swift. The post contained four screenshots of young women wearing “Swifties for Trump” t-shirts in different styles, which was taken from a post on X, formerly Twitter. Another image showed Swift dressed up like the character of Uncle Sam with the text, “Taylor wants you to vote for Donald Trump” emblazoned on it. “I accept!!” Trump wrote in the caption of his post. The pop superstar has not publicly endorsed any support for Trump, and it’s since been discovered that all of the images save for one were generated by artificial intelligence.
According to a report from WIRED magazine, the lone image is of a Trump supporter by the name of Jenna Piwowarczyk, who created the “Swifties For Trump” t-shirt, which she wore to his campaign rally in Racine, Wisconsin, in June. Piwowarczyk is selling other copies of the shirt on Etsy. The other images were traced back to Amuse, a conservative news account on X, formerly Twitter. The group cited the cancellation of Swift’s concert dates in Vienna, Austria, due to a thwarted terror attack attempt in their post. The post is labeled as satire.
Swift, who is currently performing at London’s Wembley Stadium during her Eras Tour run, hasn’t commented on the false postings. Stephen Cheung, a spokesperson for Trump’s campaign, said in an email that “Swifties for Trump is a massive movement that grows bigger every single day.” Swift publicly endorsed President Joe Biden in 2020, and blasted Trump after his “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” comment after George Floyd’s murder, condemning his “nerve to feign moral superiority” after “stoking the fires of white supremacy and racism your entire presidency.”
This isn’t the first time that Trump has willingly shared AI-generated imagery online in his campaign against Harris. He also shared one image featuring Vice President Harris dressed in red, presumably speaking to a crowd of Maoists at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, but with the old Soviet Union flag bearing the hammer and sickle hanging up.
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Taylor Swift and Ye, also known as Kanye West, will probably never end up being friends after the producer crashed the singer’s big moment at the 2009 MTV VMAs. If recent chatter is true, Taylor Swift changed her track “thanK you aIMee, with the letters, K, I, and M capitalized as a rumored shot at Kim Kardashian but now the song is titled “thank You aimEe,” capitalizing the letters Y and E.
Via the X Taylor Swift fan account @chartstswift, the song title change was highlighted. The song appears on Swift’s eleventh studio album, The Tortured Poets Department, and was assumed by fans and observers to be a dig at Kardashian. Ye and Kardashian reportedly recorded a phone call with Swift and altered the audio to make it appear that the singer agreed to a line Ye uttered on the track “Famous” from his The Life of Pablo album. Kardashian posted the audio to her social media channels, and it’s been up ever since for Swift apparently.
Of course, Swift hasn’t confirmed the rumors but that hasn’t stopped the Swifties from piecing together their theories, and considering how the beef started, who could blame them?
If you wanted to check out Taylor Swift’s “thank You aimEe” for yourself, it appears the track was initially being sold as a live song version but is no longer being sold on her website.
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Photo: Kevin Winter/MTV1415 / Getty
Taylor Swift‘s The Eras Tour shows in Vienna, scheduled for Aug. 8, 9, and 10 may be cancelled, but it hasn’t dampened the spirit of Swifties in Vienna, who have transformed the city into a celebration of Taylor’s music and community.
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The cancellation came after Austrian authorities arrested two suspects on Aug. 7, who were reportedly planning an attack on the concerts. According to police reports, the suspects had radicalized online and intended to carry out an attack at the Ernst Happel Stadium, where the shows were set to take place.
The decision to cancel the concerts was made in coordination with Swift’s management and local authorities, with the safety of the expected 65,000 concertgoers each night being the top priority.
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In the wake of the cancellations, fans in Vienna took to the streets on Aug. 8 to make the most of their time in the city and meet fellow fans.
One of the most heartwarming scenes unfolded on Corneliusgasse, a street in Vienna that shares a name with Swift’s song “Cornelia Street.” Here, fans traded handmade friendship bracelets and hung them from trees, strengthening the connections they’ve formed through Swift’s music.
24 hours after we found out our @taylorswift13 concert was cancelled because of an ISIS terrorist plot Swifties have gathered at “Cornelia street” to sing, trade friendship bracelets and just feel joy. Radicalization is a real threat, but the cowards can’t beat Swifties pic.twitter.com/a51pRVgS4s— Ariella (tortured poet version) (@ariellakimmel) August 8, 2024
In one particularly sweet moment caught on video and shared on social media, two Taylor Swift fans got engaged in Vienna in their very own “Love Story.”
The touching proposal was met with cheers and tears from the gathered fans, adding a special note of joy to an otherwise challenging day.
According to fans on social media, local businesses and cultural institutions also extended their support to the disappointed fans.
Several museums offered free entry to those holding concert tickets, while cafes and restaurants provided complimentary food and drinks.
In the face of fear and uncertainty, Swifties have turned a cancelled concert into a city-wide celebration of resilience, music, and friendship—a true reflection of the spirit of Swift’s Eras Tour.

In April, rising pop singer-songwriter Chappell Roan released “Good Luck, Babe!”, a sleek, synthy single with nonchalant verses and an emphatically dismissive chorus. Her album Midwest Princess had failed to crack the Billboard 200 when it came out the year before, but “Good Luck, Babe!” immediately showed signs of commercial promise, handily out-streaming previous tracks. It chugged onto the Billboard Hot 100, starting at No. 77, and eleven weeks later, with some coaxing, made it all the way to the top 10.
A version of this path used to be commonplace: It took time, usually months, to propel a single into the top 10. Today, however, it’s hard to find a trajectory like Chappell Roan’s; as of the third week of July, 75% of this year’s top 10 hits have debuted in the top 10. Launching a single has become more like launching a new album, or even a new movie — focus on pre-release marketing, live and die by first-week results.
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This has its advantages. Because so much of pre-release marketing involves teasing songs on social media, artists and labels often know how the public feels about a track before it comes out, so they can spend promotional dollars more efficiently. And unlike movies, songs are relatively cheap to make, so if teasing one fails to arouse interest, an artist can cut bait quickly, or even trash a track and not bother to put it out.
“The industry used to front-load any strategy before they had the confidence that it’s working,” says Nick Bobetsky, who manages Chappell Roan. “You don’t have to do that now.”
But there’s a potential downside, too. Executives say that many artists and labels are often unwilling, or unable, to execute the sort of monthslong campaigns that create hits over time — think Latto’s “Big Energy,” Teddy Swims’ “Lose Control,” or Noah Kahan’s “Stick Season,” which all took more than 20 weeks to climb the chart and peak in the top 10.
“If you don’t have a song react immediately, if it doesn’t stream an extraordinary amount right away, everyone’s like, ‘It’s not working,’” says J Grand, a former major label A&R who owns the label 88 Classic. “In the same way we need to be patient building artists, we’ve got to be patient with songs we really believe in.”
Twenty-five years ago, it was nearly impossible for a song to explode off the starting line and debut in the Hot 100’s top 10. Chart position was determined by airplay, which usually grew as radio stations took time to gauge the success of a song in their market, and single sales, which often rose in conjunction with airplay and TV appearances and the release of a music video.
Back in 2000, an average top 10 hit took 11.6 weeks — nearly three months — to reach its peak. “Both the flow of information was slow and purchasing was slow,” says Glenn McDonald, a former Spotify employee and the author of You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favorite Song: How Streaming Changes Music. “It took a while for anybody to know that a thing was happening, and then it’d be a while before they worked up the enthusiasm to actually go to a record store and buy whatever it was.”
Now, of course, social media ensures that news travels instantly, and the widespread adoption of streaming means that new music is just a click or two away. But an eight- or nine-week climb up the chart was routine until around 2018.
Planning, funding and executing that climb was the chief function of the record labels. “Back then, it was really governed by whether you went to radio, whether you were on TV, whether you had a big press story, or even whether your release was available at a store for people to buy,” says John Fleckenstein, COO at RCA Records.
Labels still have these tools at their disposal — RCA took Latto’s “Big Energy” to radio earlier than expected, according to Fleckenstein, after seeing listeners “were skewing a little older than they had on Latto’s previous releases.” “We don’t feel that growing records is a lost art,” he adds. Radio tends to play a crucial role in this process because stations typically add songs, and then play them more frequently, as they see them build, rather than immediately throwing a single into heavy rotation.
But radio doesn’t drive as much music discovery as it used to, especially for young people, and TV viewership is way down; on top of that, driving listeners to a song is considerably harder in a climate where they have seemingly infinite choice.
So the marketing process starts earlier, usually weeks before a track is released, and sometimes before the track is even finished. “You try to get people’s anticipation up for that song to come out,” Fleckenstein says. Otherwise, it’s just another track adrift in “a sea of content.”
The biggest stars seem to generate anticipation simply by existing. And since multimetric charts incorporate streams, acts like Taylor Swift or Drake routinely enjoy multiple top 10 debuts on the Hot 100 whenever they release a new full-length; Swift has single-handedly occupied the whole top 10. (Before streaming, there was no way of measuring on-demand listening after the purchase of an album, constraining the amount of songs likely to appear on the Hot 100, particularly simultaneously.)
Lesser known acts typically build excitement by previewing a track on short-form video platforms and encouraging fans to pre-save it, so they’ll listen the instant it arrives. The Swedish singer Benjamin Ingrosso shared snippets of “Look Who’s Laughing Now” 32 times across TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts over five weeks before releasing the track in June. “The entire intention was to collect pre-saves,” says Tim Collins, the singer’s manager. “The whole f–king country knew the song before it came out,” the single’s release date was moved up because fans were clamoring for it on TikTok, and it debuted at No. 1 on the Sweden Songs chart.
In the old regime, labels would pick singles ahead of time and spend lavishly to support those tracks, but they were flying blind, with no indication of how listeners felt about the song. Now that’s unnecessary. “If you throw up a brick, you’re probably not going to get the marketing that you want for your project,” Grand says.
“Every song has to prove itself,” Bobetsky adds. “And with every new phase, the artist, in a lot of ways, has to re-prove themselves.” This can be mentally taxing — an artist’s position is never safe — and cruelly Darwinian.
This landscape may also foster a fickle approach to promotion. “Artists who have had a viral moment and leaned into it can be afraid to work other songs that don’t instantly go viral,” says Ethan Curtis, founder and CEO of PushPlay, a management company and marketing agency.
“They think, ‘It didn’t have the sauce, it’s not that good,'” he explains. But “you might hit a nerve [on TikTok] because there’s a certain topic that’s trending that day, and if you posted that video yesterday, it wouldn’t have gone.”
Persistence paid off for one of Curtis’ management clients, the singer JVKE, whose song “Golden Hour” took 22 weeks to peak in the top 10 early in 2023. “A handful” of initial posts with the track sank like a stone, according to Curtis. Some teams might have moved on.
But then JVKE generated excitement on TikTok with a clip where he played the song for his childhood piano teacher. After a few more videos in this vein, interest on the app started flagging, so JVKE’s team encouraged other pianists to post their own clips playing the song “to showcase their chops.”
They made more than two dozen remixes of the single as well – picking collaborators that would expand the song’s geographical reach – then booked JVKE an appearance on The Tonight Show, and paid to push the track to radio. Later, they created their own TikTok fan pages to “repurpose and repost all the content we and others had made,” Curtis says, which “extend[ed] the momentum just long enough to break into the top 10.”
Would other singles benefit from the same sort of patient, sustained, multi-prong push over several months? “I don’t think you should ever give up on a song,” Bobetsky says. Still, he allows, “If you do justice to the song’s promotion and exposure, and it’s not sticky, then trying to keep amplifying it is pretending that we know better than the public.”
All products and services featured are independently chosen by editors. However, Billboard may receive a commission on orders placed through its retail links, and the retailer may receive certain auditable data for accounting purposes. Taylor Swift’s Eras tour will be back in the states soon! Need something to wear? Whether you’re waiting until the second […]

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Source: Ethan Miller / Getty / Ice Spice
Taylor Swift has a loyal bff in Ice Spice.
Spotted on TMZ Hip Hop, Ice Spice responded perfectly to fans in the crowd who expressed their disdain for Hip-Hop Annie’s new buddy Taylor Swift during a recent “performance” at Rolling Loud across the pond.
The “Think U The Sh*t (Fart)” crafter had to let fans know that she will always be down with Taylor Swift after fans were not pleased to hear the mega-popular pop star’s voice when the rapper played “Karma,” the single they collaborated on on.
To close out her set, Ice Spice played Taylor Swift singing the song and was met with boos and thumbs down from fans in the crowd.
In response, the “Munch” rapper blew a kiss to unhappy fans before walking off the stage, letting them know it’s all love, but she is riding for TS.
The unlikely duo quickly became besties following the release of the collaborative effort, which earned them both a Best Pop Duo Grammy nomination.
Taylor Swift even brought out Ice Spice to perform the record during her “Eras” tour stop in New Jersey, where Swifties’ greetings were much warmer than at the fan reception in Austria.
Ice Spice even joined Swift in a booth at Super Bowl LVIII to help her cheer on the Kansas City Chiefs and her boyfriend, All-Pro tight end and Champion Travis Kelce.
Seemingly unbothered by the fan’s cold reception to Taylor Swift at the Hip-Hop music festival, the Bronx rapper was later spotted hanging out with UK rapper Central Cee, further sparking dating rumors between the two.
We are sure the Swifties and Taylor Swift are happy to see they have a staunch ally in Ice Spice.
When The Weeknd’s “Die for You” came out in 2016, it was just a modest hit, failing to crack the top 40 on the Hot 100. But the track was rejuvenated during the pandemic, thanks in part to the community of TikTok users who love sped-up and slowed-down remixes. Interest in “Die for You” eventually spiked enough that it was promoted to radio as if it were a new record, and after Ariana Grande hopped on a remix, the ballad lumbered to No. 1 on the Hot 100 in March 2023, more than six years after its release.
In recent years, starting especially during the pandemic, major hits following a similar trajectory have become a regular feature of the pop landscape. Two months after “Die for You” peaked, Miguel’s early 2010s R&B hit “Sure Thing” climbed to No. 1 on the Pop Airplay chart — No. 11 on the Hot 100 — more than a dozen years after its original release. And in October, Taylor Swift‘s “Cruel Summer” topped the Hot 100, four years after it came out as a deep cut on 2019’s Lover.
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“There’s a huge trend for music that’s chronologically old to have a second life,” Amazon Music global head of music programming Mike Tierney told Billboard in 2022. “The lines are getting incredibly blurry.”
It felt reasonable to assume that this blurring process would continue. In a surprising turnaround, however, those lines look more solid this year: So far, no catalog tracks — defined as more than 18 months old — have made it to the upper reaches of the Hot 100.
The closest thing would be Djo’s neo-glam hit “End of Beginning,” which peaked at No. 11 at the end of March, just around 18 months after its original release. Early in the year, Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s 2002 nu disco cut “Murder on the Dancefloor” looked like it might become ubiquitous after its revival via the hit film Saltburn, but in the end, it topped out at No. 51 — pretty good for a song released more than two decades ago, but not at the same level as the reincarnated hits of 2023.
Executives believe this change is partly due to the deluge of superstars and breakout artists vaccuming up attention with new releases, preventing listeners from wandering aimlessly towards oldies. In addition, they say, disruptions to the pipeline of film and TV last year, and the music ecosystem on TikTok this year, closed off some avenues for old songs to transform into new hits.
While it’s not even halfway through 2024, the new-release calendar has already been packed with high-flying albums — a pair from Future & Metro Boomin, double-LP-sized releases from Beyonce and Taylor Swift, plus full-lengths from Ariana Grande, Billie Eilish, J. Cole, and more A-listers. Kendrick Lamar and Drake didn’t put out albums, yet they still commanded everyone’s attention for weeks with diss records. “The quality of new music that’s come out this year is so high that there hasn’t been the need to bring back old records to use on TikTok,” says Mike Weiss, vp of music and head of A&R at the distribution company UnitedMasters.
This sentiment was echoed by R Dub, director of programming at Z90, a top 40 station in San Diego: Playing rejuvenated oldies “is a little easier to justify,” he says, “when there just isn’t enough top-tier current product coming out.”
This matters because when catalog hits are on the verge of being massive, radio functions as a closer. After these songs have gone bananas on short-form video platforms and seen a similar bump on streaming services, then it becomes radio’s turn to blanket the rest of the population. Not only did “Die for You” and “Sure Thing” top Pop Airplay, “Cruel Summer” spent longer at No. 1 on that chart than any of Swift’s many other hits.
But a track doesn’t typically make it big at radio without a big label push, and right now, with so much current-release firepower, labels don’t feel the need to dust off old records and present them to program directors as if they’re fresh. “It’s exciting to be at top 40 again, because of all these great new singles,” says Jay Michaels, brand manager for Y101, a pop station in Mississippi. “They’re different styles, from pop to country to hip-hop to alternative; they’re big, and they’re legit.”
Importantly, these songs aren’t just coming from the usual suspects among the pop elite: First-time acts also appear to be breaking through at a steady clip, after several years of stagnation.
In 2022, executives described the landscape for important new artists as “abysmal” and “dry as f–k.” In recent months, however, Shaboozey, Sabrina Carpenter, Sexyy Red, Chappell Roan, Benson Boone, Tommy Richman, and other newbies have all been vying for chart real estate simultaneously. Their approaches vary widely: Richman’s “Million Dollar Baby” is a falsetto-smeared homage to underground Memphis hip-hop; Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” is a country club-wrecker; Boone prefers heaving pop power ballads.
The emergence of all these artists in close succession over the course of a few months is a welcome sign in the music industry. Artist development suffered “because of the pandemic,” according to Weiss. Now, he says, “it feels like we’re over that hump, there’s been enough time to really make great records, develop artists and put the work in” – building the type of foundations that can lead to sustained breakthroughs.
This means that new music has enjoyed a surge of top reinforcements as it battles with legions of oldies for eyes and ears. At the same time, catalog has been fighting with one hand tied behind its back for many months.
First, retrenchment and belt-tightening in Hollywood – combined with dual strikes in 2023 – slowed the flow of new TV shows and movies. Netflix plans to reduce the amount of original movies it makes by nearly half, according to Variety. And Deadline noted in December that while 2023 “counted 124 wide theatrical releases (opening in 1,000-plus theaters), the dual WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes forced a bulk of tentpole delays that are leaving 2024 with only 107 wide titles.” That leaves fewer opportunities for the synch soundtrack moments that often jolt catalog records to life.
At the start of this year, catalog was hobbled further when licensing negotiations between Universal Music Group and TikTok crumbled. “Many of the titles that ‘come back’ do so via TikTok — they just explode out of nowhere,” R Dub notes. That process was impeded when UMG and TikTok failed to reach an agreement at the end of January.
Most of the labels’ official recordings were then yanked from the platform. After a month, most recordings featuring contributions from Universal Music Publishing Group’s songwriters were pulled as well.
As a result, a large swath of popular music was much harder to stumble across on the app that plays an outsized role in music discovery — especially for younger listeners. And those listeners are more likely to hear a catalog track and experience it as new, simply because they’re younger and have heard less music. An 18-year-old TikToker was around four or five when “Sure Thing” first came out.
Despite this turbulence, several executives believe that catalog hits are just experiencing a temporary downturn. Mike Biggane, a former UMG and Spotify executive, predicts that “older music will continue to be rediscovered outside of the release moment.”
The star-packed release schedule can’t continue at this pace forever, leaving more room for rediscovery. And UMG and TikTok reached a deal in May.
“As long as people have a platform like TikTok where they have a viral mechanism for sharing their own interpretation of their favorite songs, you’ll continue to see these moments [where old tracks] pop up,” says Benjamin Klein, a manager who also runs Hundred Days Digital, a TikTok marketing agency.
The question is: Now that the pandemic is in the rear-view mirror, when these throwback singles re-emerge, will they look more like “Die for You” or “Murder on the Dancefloor”?
If you are a Swiftie, you know that Taylor Swift’s just-released 11th studio album, The Tortured Poets Department, has lots of Easter eggs to uncover. A great way to put the puzzle together is by getting yourself a journal. You can use a journal for many things, whether it’s writing, brainstorming ideas, songwriting and so […]
TikTok announced “the ultimate Taylor Swift in-app experience” on Friday (April 19), a way to “connect Swifties with exclusive and first-of-its-kind features.”
TikTok is certainly not the only platform to join with Swift in her promoting her new release, The Tortured Poets Department. Many iHeartRadio stations played the whole album the moment it came out (plus a song from it at the top of every hour), for example, while Spotify launched a three-day “library-themed art installation” to celebrate the album in Los Angeles.
What’s different about TikTok’s announcement: The platform is embroiled in an ongoing licensing dispute with Universal Music Group, Swift’s distribution partner. Because the two sides have been unable to reach an agreement, official recordings from UMG’s artists have (mostly) been removed from TikTok. Swift’s music was absent for a time, but a large chunk of it reappeared on the platform last week.
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Now, not only is the superstar able to circumvent UMG’s TikTok embargo, she is also getting additional promotional help from the platform. “With multiple first-of-its-kind features, fans can dive into the album with playlists to create with, as well as challenges to unlock exclusive artwork for their profiles, and the opportunity to be featured in a Fan Spotlight carousel,” TikTok’s announcement notes.
This is all but guaranteed to make some UMG artists — those who have developed devoted TikTok followings, or had success marketing music on the platform in the past — jealous. “TikTok is mostly used as a new-music discovery tool — discover a clip on TikTok, listen to it on a DSP,” a music lawyer told Billboard last week. “So those who are trying to get their music discovered are the most concerned” about being unable to promote new songs on the app.
Due to that concern, some artists with viral hits are trying to come up with workarounds to allow their songs to remain on TikTok.
Swift’s TikTok partnership, despite the UMG ban, was a display of her power in the music business, as an artist who moves as many units in a year as some entire label divisions. There had been significant speculation about what her return to the service meant — whether it implied a carve out in her contract allowing her to do a direct deal with the social platform, or whether her original contract had always contained such a provision. With today’s news, some of the parameters of that agreement have come more into focus, in terms of the promotion and marketing push that TikTok is providing for the new album.