TAYLOR’S OLD-MEDIA TAKEOVER

Aside from radio, which is being examined elsewhere on the site, Taylor Swift is cruising the avenues of traditional media as she marshals every available resource in her multipronged setup for Lover.

Scheduled TV appearances begin Thursday, as she performs on ABC’s Good Morning America from Central Park in front of what promises to be a massive turnout. She’ll follow that with a YouTube Q&A at 5pm EDT, with the video premiere of “Lover” at 5:30. A “special performance” is also promised, as is a conversation with designer Stella McCartney about their collaboration. OK, so YouTube isn’t trad media, but you can cast “Lovers Lounge Live,” as it’s billed, to your TV, so as far as we’re concerned, it counts. Tay will cap her TV offensive on Monday, when she appears on the MTV VMAs—and while the show has failed to move the needle in recent years, this performance could be the exception, coming as it does after four days of wall-to-wall awareness-building.

Whether she has a surprise appearance up her sleeve remains to be seen.

Taylor hadn’t done much press around her previous six album releases, but an unusually candid cover story in the September issue of Vogue—the mag’s biggest-seller every year—was an extremely effective attention-getter in the overall setup. She’s been on the cover of Vogue five times since 2012, along with a 2018 British Vogue cover, but none of those was timed to an album release.

She began her full-court press, so to speak by penning her own piece for the March issue of Elle¸ and was featured in April issue of Elle U.K. Time made her one of six cover subjects in its “100 Most Influential People” issue, published in April, with an essay by Shawn Mendes. In May, she sat for an interview with Entertainment Weekly. All these magazines put her on the cover, obviously.

Two weeks before the publication of the EW story, she’d made a heavily hyped appearance on ABC’s NFL Draft show from Nashville, during which she’d appeared in front of a butterfly mural to introduce “ME!,” the lead single from the album, prior to revealing its title; that happened on 6/13 via Instagram.

On Tuesday of release week, Tay went full-on old-school, taking a full-page ad in The New York Times with Spotify containing handwritten lyrics from as-yet-unnamed song against the official pastel backdrop.