Taylor Swift has an incredibly loyal fanbase of “Swifties,” as evidenced by her Billboard records and multiple sold-out concerts across the globe. Swift’s fandom is huge, including her 284 million followers on Instagram, and she makes sure to acknowledge and appreciate them. Throughout her career, Swift has done many things for her fans that keep them wanting more. She used Easter eggs to drop hints about upcoming work, hosted secret sessions, gave Christmas gifts, and held long, personal meet and greets. Swift began her journey with easter eggs using the lyric sheet inside her fist CD. She stated “When I was 15 and putting together my first album, […] I decided to encode the lyrics with hidden messages using capital letters. That’s how it started, and my fans and I have since descended into color coding, numerology, word searches, elaborate hints, and Easter eggs.” Swift has used Easter eggs to hint at album announcements, vault tracks, lyrics, and song titles. Swift does it all for the fans and states, “It’s really about turning new music into an event for my fans and trying to entertain them in playful, mischievous, clever ways, as long as they still find it fun and exciting, I’ll keep doing it.” Swift’s most recent Easter eggs have been related to her new album “The Tortured Poets Department.” Swift attended the 2024 Grammy Awards in a white dress with black gloves, which turned out to be symbolic of the song “The Albatross.” An albatross is a white bird with black on the bottom half of their wings. The dress was not the only thing fans recognized on Grammys night, as she wore a clock on a choker around her neck that pointed to 3:15, which was the date “The Eras Tour” movie was released on Disney+. Swift took her fans on a wild ride of puzzles, hints, and references to past albums in order to announce the release of her eleventh album. That same night, Taylor Swift’s website had seemingly crashed. Fans quickly realized that the mastermind herself was behind the whole thing. When fans got on her website, an error code was displayed, “’Error 321 Backend fetch failed.’ Error 321 is a communication error that would appear on a fax machine with poor telephone line connection.” Why do telephone errors matter? “I’m sorry, But the old Taylor can’t come to the phone right now. Why? Oh, ‘cause she’s dead.” The error code was a reference to Swift’s song “Look What You Made Me Do,” from her “Reputation” album leading Swifties to believe that she was going to announce “Reputation (Taylor’s Version).” A mix of seemingly random bolded letters appeared under the error code, but as Swifties know, nothing is random when it comes to Taylor Swift. The letters were “hneriergrd,” which unscrambled spells “red herring.” A red herring is something that makes you believe a certain event will occur but is just a distraction for another event. Swifties then believed “Taylor Swift (Taylor’s Version)” was a possibility, but the big announcement was TS11 (Taylor Swift 11). Taylor Swift went through all this work to announce her next album, but she did not stop there. 

          Leading up to the album’s release, Swift took inspiration from the beginning of her Easter egg journey with uppercase letters. In collaboration with Apple Music, Swift capitalized letters in the lyrics of her songs that fans would see while listening to her music. Once the letters were found, they needed to be unscrambled to reveal a word. After a few days, fans had a sentence which ended up being a lyric from “How Did It End,” a song on the surprise double album “The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology.” The double album was also foreshadowed through an Easter egg on Swift’s Instagram and repetitive peace signs. When users pulled down Swift’s Instagram page, a countdown appeared. Originally the countdown was to the release time of “The Tortured Poets Department,” but when the album dropped another countdown appeared, one that would end at 2:00 AM when she would announce and drop “The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology.” Whether through simple hints about song lyrics, word games, or elaborate puzzles that build on each other, Swift never seems to run out of ideas to keep her fans engaged and excited about each of her new albums. Long Live all the magic she’s made.