The Power (law) of Taylor Swift’s Red Re-release
On November 12, Taylor Swift released Red (Taylor’s Version), a re-recording of her album Red from 2012. This is the second re-recording that she has released after she lost the rights to the master audio of her music. The anticipation of the album was so immense that it shattered several streaming records in just one day, largely due to the new ten minute version of her song All Too Well. In the first day, the album was streamed on Spotify 90.8 million times, according to Swift’s team. Furthermore, she also broke the record of most streamed female artist in one day, as she had 122 million streams on Spotify as well- making her the first woman to amass more than 100 million streams in one day. A short film directed by Swift, All Too Well: The Short Film, has remained #1 on YouTube’s trending algorithm for several days in a row, and has amassed 36 million views in 4 days.
The enormous success of Red (Taylor’s Version) is a prime example of network effects discussed in class. The success of the album nicely fits in with the power-law paradigm discussed for measures of popularity, where the popularity of a given thing is modeled by some power law distribution (~1/k^2) with a few things being incredibly popular and the majority of things having close to zero popularity by comparison. Swift has amassed some incredibly impressive accolades with this album’s release that she most likely would not have if she, and the album, were not already popular. The record that Swift shattered of most streams in a day was previously held by Swift, in fact, highlighting that a select few musicians have the majority of streams of music. Furthermore, this is a prime example of the “rich-get-richer” model that we applied to popularity of web pages and information cascades. On Spotify, one can see what their friends are listening to at any moment. If someone were to see that most of their friends were listening to Red, they, too, would be inclined to give it a stream as well. The album’s popularity only serves to snowball because of this, which propelled it to break the Spotify records.