Decoding Taylor Swift's Music Branding Strategies

Taylor Swift is not just the name of a musician, but also the name of an entire era in the history of the music industry. A pop star who has bagged 12 Grammy Awards, a Primetime Emmy Award, 40 American Music Awards, 29 Billboard Music Awards, 23 MTV Music Awards (and a lot more), would have done something right with her music marketing, don’t you think?

In this article, we will break down Taylor Swift’s music branding, by answering these basic questions:

1. What is music branding?
2. What does Taylor Swift’s music mean?
3. What is Taylor Swift’s Music Brand?
4. What strategies can you adopt from her branding style?
5. What are our final notes?

Music Branding 101

Before we dive into this seemingly huge world of music marketing and PR, let’s get our basics right. 

Music branding is nothing but a strategy that personifies your music to your listeners - a mental image of what your music best represents, that aligns with your vision and ideology. The idea is to make your music appear more YOU - distinctive and unique. Different components come together to make your music brand - the image, content, brand aesthetics, and so on. 

Taylor Swift Hours 

Bursting You Belong With Me in your room, with your best friend screaming at the top of her lungs, is a canon event. And why shouldn’t it be? Taylor Swift did make the most iconic music, but for what?

Yeah, that’s right. For crushes, for first loves, for breakups, for revenge, for girl power, for sisterhood, and today, for situationships too. That is the kind of music Taylor Swift has continued to make - music that will resonate with almost every girl in the world, and that accounts for more than a billion! A major driving force, even more than the melodies composed so far, is the songwriting. No matter which ex she writes about - she makes sure that her music sounds personally written for every individual who listens to it, making a track so much more relatable and hence - memorable. It is basic human nature. The moment something seems to be a little more personal, the more we engage with it - here, it is Taylor’s music. 

Although she started off, curious about country music, she began exploring pop music after her second album. Commercial pop music is a genre she made 100% use of. She is talented enough to write the melody that would best highlight and sell her lyrics and it has time and again, worked! Usually with pop music, the chorus makes all the difference, but Taylor Swift revolutionized that conventional idea by experimenting with her song structures, deliberately placing lyrical melodies that would steal away from the hook, like in the songs All Too Well and Look What You Made Me Do. She made sure that the music she made came from the truest of real-life experiences she has had and not only cleverly wove that into music that would touch so many hearts but also make listeners come back to it. After all, relationships, heartbreaks, and situationships are never ‘out of fashion.’ 

Taylor Swift’s Music Brand 

Taylor Swift’s music brand comprises an image of a common American girl who has a life full of experiences that any other girl would generally have. Her Eras tour idea comes from this vision - all of her albums, and her music’s development throughout the years, represent different eras and different stages in a typical girl’s life. The beauty of her brand is that it effectively and gracefully underwent changes that were depicted more naturally and almost expectedly, despite the trolling and backlashes. 

Vulnerability 

In the speech, while receiving the Woman Of The Decade Award, Taylor Swift said that as a woman, making her space in the music industry caused others discomfort, and led many to question her. She said something very important in the speech:

“Have you ever heard someone say about a male artist - I really like his song, but I don’t know what it is, there’s something about him I don’t like? NO. That criticism is reserved for us.”

There are two things you need to understand here:

1. She is not only addressing a major real-life problem that every female artist faces in the music industry, but she is also putting forth that problem to billions of listeners and viewers by saying ‘us.’ She immediately instills a sense of belongingness and womanhood - a feeling of community. She puts forth her vulnerability, or as some might say, honesty, that is not only ‘hers.’
2. She effectively separates her music and her brand identity. She tells the listener what exactly seemed to have happened - her music is loved by people, but her brand image, her artistic persona, and her music identity, not so much. By mentioning the difference in an acceptance speech, she is also (rather unintentionally perhaps), trying to make an effort to connect her music to her brand image - remind anyone who is listening, that it is from the artist, from her, and the experiences she had, that her music is coming from, so ideally, the two should seem to be inseparable to the viewers and listeners. 

The beauty in her brand image is that she was welcoming changes at the right time. She made sure her releases were timed correctly, and her Music PR would be in sync with the kind of media attention she’d be receiving - both good and bad. She paced her music releases in such a way that it not only gave enough time for her brand to incorporate the changes in narrative.  And for those few times that it did not - she made sure that her PR made positive use of the element of surprise. 

Before we move any further, I know what you’re thinking, you’re probably wondering how any of this applies to you and what the point of even reading this blog post is but keep in mind that these principles can be applied to your brand identity as well. How would you do it? Well, that’s for you to figure out but hopefully, we’ve given you some insight into how one of the world’s biggest pop stars is doing it. Anyway, let’s continue! 

Fan engagement 

Fan names like ‘Swiftes’ are, from the marketing point of view, a part of the music branding that Taylor Swift has. Taylor Swift has a way of engaging with fans that almost no one else does - she expresses her genuineness on different occasions. Be it with surprising fans, charity work, or live shows that become a huge festival of its own, it is always wholesome. That makes potential listeners and fans more drawn to her music because they now have developed a certain image (brand image) of her as a music artist. 

Pssst…come here: More often than not, what you see on pap cameras, the jumping on the stands, and cheering for Selena Gomez, is also what is real. Her personality as a human being and her personality as a music artist are difficult to separate, which has led to both positive and negative consequences. Additionally, during interviews, she has time and again spoken about her fans and how grateful she is for all the consistent support and love she’s gotten throughout the years. 

Strategies you could adopt from Taylor Swift’s branding style

Social Media and Fan Interaction

If Taylor Swift has done one thing right in all these years, is to not only build a great fanbase but to REALLY KNOW her fans - the age, what they like about Taylor, what they expect from her music, and everything else. She knows like how you’d know a childhood best friend. And she uses social media to get that data - updated regularly. 

Taylor Swift is known to drop hints in social media posts, hints only Swifties would get. These hints could be of her new album, a collaboration with an artist, something about her merch, and so on. You could use social media not only to promote your music and build your brand consistently across all platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and Facebook but also to engage with your fans in such ways - create curiosity and interact with fans on a regular basis through live streaming, replying to few comments on your posts and so on. 

Pssst…come here: Make use of holiday seasons, and other special occasions to announce gigs and tours, customized gifts, and free tickets to a show, and to hold contests for fans. Taylor Swift made ‘Swiftmas,’ where she selected fans and sent them gifts as well. The occasion of a festival makes such fan interactions all the more special and long-lasting. 

User Generated Content 

It wouldn’t be wrong if we were to say that Taylor is what she is today, because of her fans and the kind of content people are constantly making ever since TikTok and Instagram Reels became a part of daily life. From edits, to Did You Know, to decoding song lyrics and which ex of hers was it meant for, to the analysis of Taylor’s wardrobe, and top pop culture moments with Taylor Swift, you can find anything with short-form visual content format. Without having to ask her fans, swifties delivered. 

Ask your fans to make content using your music, for starters. Use it as background music for instance. Once you’ve built a considerable fanbase, you could encourage your fans to make videos for any contest you’re holding, dance challenges, and so on. As and when your fanbase builds, the less you will have to request participation; thus making user-generated content advocate for your brand identity. 

Repurpose and rebrand 

One of the most crucial traits you could take from Taylor Swift is her ability to adapt and be flexible. And she has done that time and again, which worked in her favor, even though the reason for doing so could have been different. The ability to take backlash is very important while building your music brand from scratch, it will only be natural to reinvent yourself. Taylor Swift isn’t the only one who has done that. The Weeknd brought his album Dawn FM which took synth pop to the next level. 

Pssst…come here: Consistency is great and shows resilience, yes. But there are always moments, tracks, albums, and art, that would make you reconsider how best you could represent that to the world. The only challenge you have ahead of you is to make these changes, subtle or not, as smoothly as possible. When you already have a lot of content made, the most overlooked option is to repurpose that content into new material. The 15 versions of Taylor in the music video of Look What Made Me Do is a great example of that. An even simpler example of that is remixes of your track with other artists - which ultimately benefits your and your collaborator’s brand image as well. 

Suspense is the weapon

There was a period when Taylor Swift disappeared from the public eye - the paparazzi rarely caught her, and at one point, even the fans didn’t know what she was doing. The suspense built on and at the time when it peaked, Taylor became active on TikTok, and other social media platforms to drop clues about what the fans could next expect. This period is important to not only know how the brand will do without any music PR, and make changes accordingly, but also add the suspense to make your music much awaited. The buzz is what your brand would need at the time when you aren’t giving interviews or getting media attention. 

Pssst…come here: Some people still suspect that Rihanna has new music up her sleeve. It is the sassy comments that Rihanna has given to interviewers who have asked about her comeback to the industry; that leave fans less satisfied and more curious - it is neither a no nor a yes. We have sort of given up, but who knows? 

Final thoughts

Some of these strategies could be extremely useful when used at the right time. And that is something we cannot fully be sure of because every music artist’s journey is different; every music brand’s development varies. The fact that it has worked because it is Taylor Swift is a great argument, but what we’d say is, you could be the next pop/afrobeat/indie Taylor Swift and that’d be more of a compliment than an insult. 

We at GreaseRelease, have a bunch of curators on our network who are looking for new & exciting music to push on their massive playlists. If you make music and want to reach a wider audience, check out our submission platform and get a chance to reach millions of listeners! Submit your tracks now! 

 

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