How the Taylor Swift Fan Content Ecosystem Helped Push ‘Showgirl’ to Even Greater Heights

In the last week, the general public was pulled into a thriving ecosystem of content created by hardcore Taylor Swift fans, from podcasts to short videos — which likely played a role in helping her The Life of a Showgirl album break the record set by Adele’s 25 for first-week U.S. sales. 

The release of The Life of a Showgirl has generated conversation that’s not simply confined to Swift’s most fervent fans, says Zachary Hourihane, a Singapore-based creator who co-hosts Evolution of a Snake, a podcast about Swift, and makes videos under the moniker Swiftologist. Hourihane points to a reaction video he posted on TikTok — featuring critical comments about the numerous phallic references in Swift’s new song “Wood” — which received 4.8 million views and 8,800 comments in six days. 

“The people that are interacting with this video are not fans, they’re casual listeners,” he says. 

The conversation around The Life of a Showgirl got a boost from YouTube, a hotspot for fan-generated content, when the platform dedicated a section of its homepage to the content and conversation around the album release. On the YouTube Apple TV app, a “YouTube Features” section described as “Your home for The Life of a Showgirl” offered a smorgasbord of Swift, though there were only two videos from Swift’s YouTube channel: the official music video for “The Fate of Ophelia” and the combined “visualizer” videos for the songs “CANCELLED!” and “Eldest Daughter.”  

The YouTube section also highlighted the vastness of Swift’s media presence during the album launch and her promotional tour. There was a video of her appearance on The Graham Norton Show, a British late-night program. One video clip showed actress Keri Russell talking about Swift on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. A few critical videos appeared, too, such as podcaster Misha Petrov picking apart Swift’s song lyrics and conservative commentator Ben Shapiro’s scathing Showgirl album review.  

More than anything, though, YouTube revealed the depth of the Swifties’ community. One Swift-focused podcast that was picked up by YouTube’s algorithm was Hits Differently. Hosted by Molly and Ryan (they do not reveal their last names for privacy purposes), Hits Differently is a two-year-old podcast with nearly 80 episodes and approximately 4.5 million YouTube views to date. To celebrate the arrival of The Life of a Showgirl, the duo hosted a 50-minute live stream when the album release countdown clock went live. That video was viewed over 100,000 times, roughly 10 times the views of a typical Hits Differently YouTube video.  

Hits Differently is “a space for Swifties to feel like they have other people to talk to about stuff,” says Molly. “If they don’t have friends or family that listen to Taylor’s music, when [The Life of a Showgirl] drops at midnight, they’ll come to our channel to talk to each other.” Molly and Ryan typically release one episode a week, but pushed out multiple YouTube videos around the album launch. The pair also posts the videos on their Patreon page, where supporters can get early access to ad-free videos and exclusive content.  

Another show, The 13 Podcast, also saw tremendous interest around Swift’s album release, says Ana Szabo, one of the show’s four co-hosts. During album release week, the podcast, which Szabo says has racked up more than 6 million audio downloads in its five-year history, released three episodes, including a live listening party that attracted 11,000 fans. “With the Swifty community being so global, we have a lot of listeners that tune into our podcast from all over the world,” she says. 

Major events — an album release, a tour, an engagement announcement — give Swift-focused podcasts an opportunity to break from their routine and attract new followers. For The 13 Podcast, a typical episode examines Swift’s lyrics with a detective’s eye. “We try to find any literary connections,” explains Szabo, “inspirations, connections to her other songs across her discography, her music videos, everything that she’s said about the song.” 

Close examination of Swift’s lyrics is typical for Swift podcasts, says Andrew Ledbetter, a professor of communications at Texas Christian University. A Swift fan himself, Ledbetter has studied the narratives in Swift’s songs and analyzed their lyrical content. He explains that Swift’s music is built on narratives — the villains and heroes, longing and regret, the virtuous hero, finding meaning in the ordinary, the empowered voice — that her fans connect with.   

“Every Taylor Swift podcast I’ve heard, the lyrics are front and center,” says Ledbetter. “Swifties understand what a red scarf means. They understand what a koi fish guitar means, or a friendship bracelet.” 

Swift podcasts have become so popular that some creators are hosting offline events, too. The 13 Podcast threw a party for The Eras Tour stop in Dallas that attracted 350 fans. When Swift released The Tortured Poets Department album the following year, the group attracted 600 fans to another event, Swities in the Park, that featured a vendor market filled with Swifties offering things like face painting, jewelry, knitted goods and watercolor portraits. Their next event, on Oct. 17, will be at the Omni Hotel in Dallas.  

Evolution of a Snake has also ventured into live events. Hourihane and his co-host, Madeline Rubicam, went on a 10-city tour of the U.S. this summer, appearing in 300- to 400-seat theaters such as The Great Star Theater in San Francisco and The Miracle Theatre in Washington, D.C. In September, they took Evolution of a Snake to the 350-capacity Sugar Club Dublin in Ireland and the 300-seat Unicorn Theatre in London. Each show was a “condensed” version of the podcast’s “detailed,” “day-by-day” recaps of her career, explains Hourihane.  

“I think people just want to find community, and we love hosting the events,” says The 13 Podcast’s Szabo. “It’s a lot of fun, and it’s really, really wonderful to meet our listeners.” 

It’s hard not to attribute some of Showgirl‘s explosive first-week sales to the avalanche of content. Swifties purchased 3.4 million copies of Showgirl in its first week of release, reveling in the 34 variants that included limited-edition CDs and both bonus tracks and voice memos from Swift. The more casual fans contributed to the more than 460 million on-demand streams in less than a week. When the final tally is announced this Sunday (Oct. 12), Swiftie podcasters and content creators who contributed, to whatever extent, to the album’s record-setting feat could rightly take a bow. Swift herself surely wouldn’t begrudge them that.