Artists often tend to have a lot of power over their fans. Their fans sometimes look to them for guidance and distraction, and often admire them to the point of looking at them as people who are above human.
Taylor Swift is notorious among swifties for using her influence to get them to go on scavenger hunts and do various projects and essentially unleash chaos. (The fun kind.) Right after Red Taylor’s Version was announced, she posted a video showing groups of scrambled letters that her fans used to try to figure out the titles of the vault tracks. When the Midnights album was announced, she started a thing called “Midnights Mayhem With Me,” where on random days leading up to the release she would post a video at midnight announcing one of the track titles. No one knew which days this would happen, so many fans would often stay up until midnight to check her social media just to see if she would post one that night. Then finally 13 days before the release, she announced that tonight we would “mayhem till the morning,” and many fans stayed up all night as the rest of the track titles were announced every few hours. Most recently, following the announcement of 1989 Taylor’s Version, she partnered with Google to create a game that fans would have to play in order to get the names of the vault tracks. When fans googled her name, an icon of a blue vault would pop up and clicking on it would start a game of world scramble, where fans would have to use clues and their knowledge of the 1989 era to unscramble all the words. There were 89 word puzzles in total, and once 33 million puzzles were solved globally, (which only took a day,) the game gave everyone access to a recorded message from Taylor announcing the vault track titles.
Fans like it when Taylor does things like this because it makes them feel like they are a part of something. And Taylor isn’t the only artist who is known to have this kind of power over their fans. We as humans tend to look to people we admire for guidance and inspiration, and this creates an effect where we are more likely to do something if an artist or celebrity that we like and admire are telling us to, or if we see them doing it too.
