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Context

Taylor Swift’s album ‘Midnights’ released Oct. 21st and topped the charts with first week sales of over 1.5 million units. These first 7 days outdid recent releases from Bad Bunny, Adele, and Drake combined and mark the first time an artist has sold more one million records in an opening week since Swift’s ‘Reputation’ did so in 2017. 

So, how’d she do it?

Upon its release, “Midnights” became Spotify’s most-streamed album in a single day. But streaming isn’t the key to Taylor’s sales success. After all, other artists have had bigger first week streaming numbers, but Taylor outsold them by far.

The secret is Taylor and her team put together a comprehensive strategy that effectively hacked the unhackable new Billboard rules.

Bundling Preorders via Ticket Presale Access 

Bundling isn’t what it used to be; the days of climbing the charts off the strength of branded energy drinks, bottle openers, merch presales or condoms are over. Nowadays albums bundled with merchandise need to be available on the same website for individual purchase, and the bundles must cost at least $3.49 more for them to count towards charting. 

Swift’s team found a workaround: they allowed fans who made pre orders on physical albums access to presale codes for an eagerly anticipated tour release, a move which sparked her supporters into action. 

Unique Offers

The digital version that users stream features songs that the physical versions do not, and vice versa. For fans to share in the full experience, they had to both stream it and buy it. Rather than spreading all the exclusives towards physical releases, with Midnights the digital version gave you a purpose to listen too. 

20 Physical Album Offerings

Swift offered at least 20 collectable variants of Midnights, each featuring unique packaging and formats. This even included autographed editions and a vinyl that sold exclusively in Target. A strategy like this calls back to when BTS made ‘Map of the Soul: 7’ available in four unique CD editions. In that case, those CD’s accounted for 330,000 of the 347,000 traditional sales in the album’s first week.

Swift took BTS’ strategy a step further: fans were prompted to collect four unique vinyl editions, each of which had its own cover art that when put together, looks like a clock. Every vinyl album included 13 songs, unique back and front cover art, and a collectible 8-page lyric booklet with never-before-seen photos. Taylor also offered a CD version (see visual above) that replicates this 4 item model. The clock can be assembled with a $49 USD extra purchase on Swift’s website.  With this product she’s effectively found a way to turn a single merch item (a clock) into 4 unique album sales.

Why is this an extra savvy offer? For digital albums only 1 purchase will be counted per customer. Therefore if a customer buys multiple digital albums the sale will be adjusted down to 1 unit in terms of charting. However, if a fan purchases up to 4 copies of a physical record in a single reporting week, each copy is reported as an additional official sale. 

Therefore, this 4 album ‘Clock’ offering maximizes charting and sales totals. Anyone wanting to complete the clock will need all 4, plus the additional assembly purchase, pushing Taylor up the charts and filling her coffers in the process. From personal experience pressing records, the vinyl itself costs about 1$ each after you hit a minimum 500 threshold. At 30$ USD a piece, for superstars like Swift there’s a lot of room for profit.

Effective Promo and Advertising

The new album was also met with a flurry of effective promo and partnerships:

Swift released a TikTok video series called “Midnights Mayhem with Me.” These featured thirteen episodes between September 21 and October 7, 2022 where she unveiled the track-list one by one in a randomized order from in front of a curtain backdrop.

An iHeartRadio program called Midnights with Taylor, featuring commentary from Swift, ran on iHeart’s pop stations from October 21 to 26, during which the album received additional airplay.

Swift also spent big on digital advertising, running YouTube homepage ads throughout the launch week, which encouraged users to interact with the project on the video sharing platform.

She also teased her album and live tour on The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon.

On Spotify, Taylor released nightly clips about the album on the mobile-only pre-save page. This incentivized  fans to pre-save the album on Spotify to get access to the exclusive stories. Plus, once the album became live, Spotify had a special lyric teaser video.

Early Preparation 

Will we see this physical-first approach to charting take over? I’m not so sure. Part of the Billboard rule changes included a tweak which means that physical albums must be shipped before they can be counted towards the charts. This is meant to dissuade labels from pumping out a slew of vinyl and CDs on a Thursday afternoon—the last day of the chart tracking week—that won’t ship for three months in a last-ditch effort to juice sales.

In order to allow for hundreds of thousands of items to be created, Taylor must have submitted her album months before her release date. That’s not how a lot of artists are used to operating in 2022, especially given the risk of music leaking and diluting sales as it’s spread on the internet. 

Key Takeaway

What Taylor did that’s likely to have the biggest impact on the music industry is the emphasis she put on this album's rollout. It was thoughtful, comprehensive, and led to great results both for her fans and her label. The days of artists like Beyoncé dropping projects without notice may be over. 

After all, it takes 1,500 on-demand audio and/or video song streams to equal 1 album sale. It’s hard to imagine that in one week even the most fervent fan could drive the 1,500 streams needed to generate a sale. It might just be easier to convert that fan into a physical album purchaser. That’s something Taylor Swift reminded the music industry. 

Written by Patrick Gilley, Marketing Manager at Wavo

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