Taylor Swift, remediating the self, and nostalgic girlhood in tween music fandom

Abstract

As traditional album sales decline, music artists have turned to deluxe editions and store exclusives to entice their fan bases into buying not just physical copies but multiple copies of the same record. In attempting to engage with a young and increasingly digital audience—many of whom do not even own devices on which to play physical copies of music—Taylor Swift has chosen to use emotional rhetoric to transpose her aura into a desire for the tangible. Swift brings fans along with her on a journey into her own past, reigniting interest in earlier forms of media and capitalizing on a tween ideal of bedroom culture. In creating deluxe versions of her album Lover (2019) with scanned copies of her teen diary entries alongside blank journal pages for fans, Swift encourages a melding of fan and star in a moment of adolescent expression. With this production, Swift attempts to create physical objects of emotion, to reinforce girl culture as brand, and to bring value back to the nondigital album. Swift creates purposeful space in her own narrative for fans to insert themselves and plug in their understanding of her star text, further aligning herself and the fan in a sort of metafandom.