Taylor Swift has been pretty strategically quiet the last few weeks ahead of the release of her next album, The Tortured Poets Department next Friday. We’re close… which means we should be hearing more from her. And it’s happening already. 

 

As Variety reports, several of her songs are available for use again on TikTok as of today – and this is notable because, if you recall, a couple of months ago, all of Universal’s music was pulled from the platform over licensing, A.I., and piracy concerns as the two companies were unable to come to a new agreement. 

 

Taylor, as we have seen, is a savvy businessperson. She understands the impact of social media on a song, on an album. After all, look what happened just recently with Beyoncé and “Texas Hold ‘Em”. If TikTok gets hold of a song, the song is a smash. So of course, with the album dropping so soon Taylor wouldn’t want to lose out on that. The speculation then is that she’s negotiated her own deal with TikTok and may also be partnering with them to promote her new music. 

As for the new music, we had the tracklist, now we have the length of each track: 

 

Per that tweet, several songs on the album are over four minutes long, and a couple of them run over five minutes. In fact, nearly half of the tracks on the 16-track album are over four minutes. And I’ll say again about Taylor what I already said about Beyoncé when COWBOY CARTER came out – songs are getting shorter and shorter, like between two and three minutes, to accommodate the algorithm, and the subsequent nagging from so-called digital media experts who say that nobody can pay attention to or listen to anything longer than that. But Beyoncé and Taylor Swift are not artists who are tailoring their art to the algorithm. If a song has to be five minutes, it’ll be five minutes. Or six minutes, which is how long “Virgo’s Groove” is off RENAISSANCE. And nobody in their right mind has ever been like, oh, I wish “Virgo’s Groove” was shorter. They might actually want it to be longer! Because it’s still four minutes shorter than Taylor’s “All Too Well”, the TEN MINUTE version – which was a monster hit. And a flex for her, as if to say, watch me f-ck the algorithm with a ten minute song that defies all your stats. If the sh-t is good, it doesn’t matter how long it is, people will appreciate it. See also Reesa Teesa. 

Anyway, note that track five on Tortured Poets is “So Long, London”, heavily speculated to be about Joe Alwyn. Most people who pay attention to Taylor’s album habits know that track five is often what she considers to be the most personal song – “All Too Well”, for example, is a track five song. Taylor’s new track five, “So Long, London”, is over four minutes. In other words, we’re getting a story. And she’s taking her sweet time telling it.