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    Taylor Swift’s ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ Arrives

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    The pop superstar’s latest album was preceded by a satellite radio channel, a word game, a return to TikTok and an actual library. For her fans, more is always welcome.Taylor Swift was already the most ubiquitous pop star in the galaxy, her presence dominating the music charts, the concert calendar, the Super Bowl, the Grammys.Then it came time for her to promote a new album.In the days leading up to the release of “The Tortured Poets Department” on Friday, Swift became all but inescapable, online and seemingly everywhere else. Her lyrics were the basis for an Apple Music word game. A Spotify-sponsored, Swift-branded “library installation,” in muted pink and gray, popped up in a shopping complex in Los Angeles. In Chicago, a QR code painted on a brick wall directed fans to another Easter egg on YouTube. Videos on Swift’s social media accounts, showing antique typewriters and globes with pins, were dissected for clues about her music. SiriusXM added a Swift radio station; of course it’s called Channel 13 (Taylor’s Version).About the only thing Swift didn’t do was an interview with a journalist.At this stage in Swift’s career, an album release is more than just a moment to sell music; it’s all but a given that “The Tortured Poets Department” will open with gigantic sales numbers, many of them for “ghost white,” “phantom clear” and other collector-ready vinyl variants. More than that, the album’s arrival is a test of the celebrity-industrial complex overall, with tech platforms and media outlets racing to capture whatever piece of the fan frenzy they can get.Threads, the newish social media platform from Meta, primed Swifties for their idol’s arrival there, and offered fans who shared Swift’s first Threads post a custom badge. Swift stunned the music industry last week by breaking ranks with her record label, Universal, and returning her music to TikTok, which Universal and other industry groups have said pays far too little in royalties. Overnight, TikTok unveiled “The Ultimate Taylor Swift In-App Experience,” offering fans digital goodies like a “Tortured Poets-inspired animation” on their feed.Before the album’s release on Friday, Swift revealed that a music video — for “Fortnight,” the first single, featuring Post Malone — would arrive on Friday at 8 p.m. Eastern time. At 2 a.m., she had another surprise: 15 more songs. “I’d written so much tortured poetry in the past 2 years and wanted to share it all with you,” she wrote in a social media post, bringing “The Anthology” edition of the album to 31 tracks.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Taylor Swift Sells a Rainbow of Vinyl Albums. Fans Keep Buying Them.

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      Artists across pop genres are finding success with colored vinyl and different variants of their releases. For Swifties, the urge to collect them all is strong.When Taylor Swift released nine vinyl editions of her album “Folklore” in 2020, Tylor Hammers, a fan in Florida, took notice. But it wasn’t until “Midnights” two years later that he became a true collector, scouring the internet and retail shops for every variation of her albums he could find — spending about $1,000 in the process — and cataloging the technicolor expanse of Swift’s LP output in an online discography.“I get enjoyment out of being a completionist,” Hammers, 24, said in a recent interview.He’s not the only one.Although streaming remains the dominant music format, physical media has been a growing niche where the industry can cater to so-called superfans, who express their dedication to artists by shelling out big bucks for collectible versions of new releases, sometimes in multiple quantities. K-pop acts like BTS pioneered this strategy by putting out an array of elaborate CD packages, often featuring goodies like postcards and photo booklets, which helped the boy band repeatedly go to No. 1.But nobody does it quite like Swift, or at least at the same scale. Last year she sold 3.5 million LPs in the United States, thanks in part to five pastel-hued variants of “1989 (Taylor’s Version),” a rerecording of her 2014 album, and the popularity of Swift’s entire catalog during her record-breaking Eras Tour.When Swift’s latest album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” comes out on Friday, it will be available in a portfolio of different versions — on vinyl, CD and even cassette — with bonus tracks and, on certain “deluxe” editions sold through Swift’s website, trinkets like magnets, photo cards and engraved bookmarks. Some items, like a standard CD, go for as little as $13. But last weekend, Swift’s site offered a limited run of autographed LPs for $50, which, according to fans on social media, vanished in 20 minutes.“The Tortured Poets Department” comes out on Friday in a number of different versions and formats including CD, left, and cassette. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      How Hertz Turned O.J. Simpson Into the ‘Superstar in Rent‐a‐Car’

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      The famous ad campaign paid dividends for both the company and its pitchman, who died on Wednesday.Executives at the rental car company Hertz knew what they wanted to project to potential business travelers in the 1970s: speed, reliability and efficiency.They quickly realized that one man radiated all of those qualities. So they made the football player O.J. Simpson, who died on Wednesday at the age of 76, the first Black star of a national television advertising campaign.“They had a slogan — the Superstar in Rent‐a‐Car — and I was the current reigning superstar as far as the competition was concerned,” Simpson told The New York Times in 1976.The campaign would pay dividends for both the company and its pitchman, who in early Hertz ads was shown racing through an airport terminal and leaping over rope barriers, clutching a briefcase instead of cradling a football. In some of Simpson’s later ads, average Janes and Joes cheered him on as he ran, yelling, “Go, O.J., Go!”At that time, decades before Simpson was acquitted of killing his former wife and her friend, he was known for dazzling on the field for the University of Southern California and the Buffalo Bills. His athleticism and speed made Simpson the perfect choice for the Hertz commercials that widened his stardom beyond the gridiron, offering him up as a suave, smiling promoter known to football fans and businessmen alike.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      How Ozempic Turned a 1970s Hit Into an Inescapable Jingle

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      The diabetes drug has become a phenomenon, and “Oh, oh, oh, Ozempic!” — a takeoff of the Pilot song “Magic” — has played a big part in its story.In February 2023, David Paton, guitar case in hand, strode across the most famous pedestrian walkway in rock history and into London’s Abbey Road Studios.Paton was no stranger to the rooms where the Beatles changed the course of popular music: His 1970s pop-rock band Pilot recorded two albums there. In his second life, as an in-demand studio and touring musician for the likes of Kate Bush and Elton John, he clocked numerous sessions with the prog-rock outfit the Alan Parsons Project, whose namesake produced Pilot’s signature hit, “Magic.” He even spent some time there with his boyhood hero, Paul McCartney, singing backup vocals on Wings’ “Mull of Kintyre.”Paton had come to London to record a new version of “Magic.” “It was a great thrill to be back at Abbey Road, singing my song,” he said in a recent video interview from his home studio in Edinburgh, an array of guitars displayed behind him. The track’s stair-step chorus — “Oh, oh, oh/it’s MAAA-gic” — could test Paton’s vocal range even back in 1974, and again a year later, when the song became a worldwide hit, peaking at No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100.“It’s just about the enjoyment of life,” he said. “About waking up in the morning, you know? I was 22 when I wrote it.” Now he was 73, and unsure if he could still reach those high notes. But Paton took his place in front of the Abbey Road microphone and confidently sang that indelible hook, only with the word “magic” swapped out for something less ephemeral and more pharmaceutical: “Oh, oh, oh, Ozempic.”As television viewers are all too aware, that altered chorus from “Magic” serves as the advertising jingle for the Type 2 diabetes medication Ozempic. Since the product arrived in 2018, the bowdlerized version of “Magic” — first rerecorded by work-for-hire musicians, and then re-rerecorded by Paton at Abbey Road — has taken its place alongside such classics of the form as Subway’s “Five Dollar Foot Long” and McDonald’s “I’m Lovin’ It” as marvels of marketing ingenuity.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      The Designer Who Makes Movie Posters Worthy of Museums

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      You’ve seen Dawn Baillie’s posters for thrillers, comedies and dramas outside cineplexes. Now her work is being exhibited at Poster House in Manhattan.The killer’s knife, a woman cowering before it.This was typical horror movie box cover stuff before 1991, when Dawn Baillie was asked to design a poster for a cerebral new thriller called “Silence of the Lambs.” She learned it was about a young F.B.I. agent-in-training, Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster), who enlists the help of an imprisoned serial killer, Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins), to solve a case.“It came to me that I could illustrate ‘Silence’ if Clarice was the ‘lamb’ and the moth — or the bad guys — is what has left her without the right words,” Baillie explained in an email. “I think the poster works in showing vulnerability, strangeness and eeriness.”In other words, the poster said: This isn’t your typical scary movie.Starting March 14, Baillie gets marquee billing in a new exhibition, “The Anatomy of a Movie Poster: The Work of Dawn Baillie,” at Poster House in Manhattan. The show, through Sept. 8, takes us from her first poster, “Dirty Dancing” (1987) to “The Tragedy of Macbeth” (2021), for which she was the creative director. Along the way are posters for films as varied as “Zoolander,” “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” and “The Truman Show.”Baillie’s career as a movie poster designer and creative director spans over four decades. Born in 1964, Baillie entered advertising in the 1980s when the industry was dominated by men and posters were mostly made by hand, not computer. After working at the agencies Seiniger Advertising and Dazu, in 1992 she co-founded BLT, the agency behind memorable posters for recent films (“Barbie”), TV shows (“The Last of Us”) and Broadway (“The Music Man”).Angelina Lippert, the chief curator and director of content at Poster House, called Baillie a “design genius” with a style defined by “effortless simplicity.” Take the poster for “The Silence of the Lambs.”“It’s visual anxiety that you get when you look at this, which is what makes it indelible,” Lippert said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      Ad Nods to Taylor Swift and Football, Drawing Cheers and Criticism

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      A Cetaphil commercial showed a father and daughter connecting over football and the music superstar. But a social media influencer said the idea was stolen from her.When an advertisement for Cetaphil lotion was released online days before the Super Bowl, it drew rave reviews for a narrative that evoked a familiar story for parents, football fans and followers of Taylor Swift.In the commercial, a father unsuccessfully tries to interest his teenage daughter, who’s distracted by something on her phone, in a football game. She goes to her bedroom to complete her skin-care routine — using Cetaphil on her face. She then walks downstairs to see her father watching a football game while wearing a white jersey bearing the No. 89. The announcer can be heard saying, “Well folks, there she is, the most famous fan at the game,” drawing a smile from the daughter.The father, sensing an opportunity, later walks into her room with a red No. 13 jersey for her and jokingly applies cream to his face before imploring her to come and watch the game. She goes downstairs, lays her phone on the coffee table and curls up next to her father. The ad ends with them wearing their jerseys on the couch and laughing. An on-screen message reads, “This season, dads and daughters found a new way to connect.”Though it does not directly mention Taylor Swift, the ad is a nod to how the music superstar’s relationship with the Kansas City tight end Travis Kelce was said to have gotten more fathers and daughters watching N.F.L. games together this season. The No. 13 and No. 89 jerseys were implicit references to Ms. Swift’s “lucky number,” 13, and her (and Mr. Kelce’s) birth year, 1989. And the father in the ad wore friendship bracelets, as do many of Ms. Swift’s fans.Users on social media reacted positively to the ad, drawing connections to their own lives. One TikTok user who posted the ad said it “has me in tears.” On X, fan accounts for Ms. Swift lauded the commercial, and one user said, “as the daughter of a football coach and a die-hard Swiftie, I adore this.”But on Friday night, a woman who has a popular TikTok account, Sharon Mbabazi, said the company had stolen the idea for the ad from her. On her social media accounts, she shared a TikTok post from September in which she is doing her makeup when her stepfather walks in and tells her about Mr. Kelce’s surge in Instagram followers, jersey sales and popularity since his relationship with Ms. Swift became public.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      All the Super Bowl Commercials So Far, Ranked

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      Here is our ranking of the Super Bowl commercials we have been able to track down ahead of the big game.In the spirit of “Who actually watches the game?,” here is our ranking of all the Super Bowl commercials we have been able to track down so far, from best to worst.Ground rules: Only ads being shown on the national CBS broadcast during the game are eligible. Certain spots, including several advocating a boycott of Tesla and a number of CBS promos for its own primetime series, were omitted from this ranking. Commercials not available beforehand or with a live component — including spots from FanDuel, TurboTax, the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism and the controversial Chinese e-commerce company Temu — will be added after the game. (If Travis Kelce proposes to Taylor Swift in a surprise ad for The Knot, we will probably have our winner.)The Best of the BunchThese are the ones we’ll remember for at least a day or two.BMWChristopher Walken makes fun of people making fun of Christopher Walken, with a cameo performance by the Super Bowl halftime star Usher. As always, he walks the walk.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      The Apple ’1984’ Ad Changed the Super Bowl Forever

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      An oral history of Apple’s groundbreaking “1984” spot, which helped to establish the Super Bowl as TV’s biggest commercial showcase.Four decades ago, the Super Bowl became the Super Bowl.It wasn’t because of anything that happened in the game itself: On Jan. 22, 1984, the Los Angeles Raiders defeated Washington 38-9 in Super Bowl XVIII, a contest that was mostly over before halftime. But during the broadcast on CBS, a 60-second commercial loosely inspired by a famous George Orwell novel shook up the advertising and the technology sectors without ever showing the product it promoted. Conceived by the Chiat/Day ad agency and directed by Ridley Scott, then fresh off making the seminal science-fiction noir “Blade Runner,” the Apple commercial “1984,” which was intended to introduce the new Macintosh computer, would become one of the most acclaimed commercials ever made. It also helped to kick off — pun partially intended — the Super Bowl tradition of the big game serving as an annual showcase for gilt-edged ads from Fortune 500 companies. It all began with the Apple co-founder Steve Jobs’s desire to take the battle with the company’s rivals to a splashy television broadcast he knew nothing about.In recent interviews, several of the people involved in creating the “1984” spot — Scott; John Sculley, then chief executive of Apple; Steve Hayden, a writer of the ad for Chiat/Day; Fred Goldberg, the Apple account manager for Chiat/Day; and Anya Rajah, the actor who famously threw the sledgehammer — looked back on how the commercial came together, its inspiration and the internal objections that almost kept it from airing. These are edited excerpts from the conversations.JOHN SCULLEY On Oct. 19, 1983, we’re all sitting around in Steve [Jobs’s] building, the Mac building, and the cover of Businessweek says, “The Winner is … IBM.” We were pretty deflated because this was the introduction of the IBM PCjr, and we hadn’t even introduced the Macintosh yet.STEVE HAYDEN Jobs said, “I want something that will stop the world in its tracks.” Our media director, Hank Antosz, said, “Well, there’s only one place that can do that — the Super Bowl.” And Steve Jobs said, “What’s the Super Bowl?” [Antosz] said, “Well, it’s a huge football game that attracts one of the largest audiences of the year.” And [Jobs] said, “I’ve never seen a Super Bowl. I don’t think I know anybody who’s seen a Super Bowl.”John Sculley, right, with Steve Jobs in 1984. The ad would promote the company’s new Macintosh personal computer.Marilynn K. Yee/The New York TimesFRED GOLDBERG The original idea was actually done in 1982. We presented an ad [with] a headline, which was “Why 1984 Won’t Be Like ‘1984,’” to Steve Jobs, and he didn’t think the Apple III was worthy of that claim.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      $7 Million for 30 Seconds? It’s Worth It at the Super Bowl.

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      In a time of fragmentation, advertising during the game’s broadcast is still a reliable way to boost company revenue and familiarize viewers with a brand.A cat meowing for Hellmann’s mayonnaise, Peyton Manning chucking Bud Light beers to patrons in a bar and Kris Jenner stacking Oreo cookies. They all have one thing in common: Those companies paid seven figures to get their products in front of viewers during this year’s Super Bowl.For the second consecutive year, the average cost of a 30-second ad spot during the Super Bowl was $7 million. Even as many businesses are being more disciplined with the money they have for marketing, and with spending on advertising slowing in recent years, the cost of a Super Bowl ad continues to go up.The reason is simple: There is no opportunity guaranteed to reach more people than the Super Bowl, and the slice of every other pie keeps shrinking.“It’s a throwback in terms of reaching everyone all at once,” said Charles Taylor, a professor of marketing at the Villanova School of Business.In an increasingly fragmented media landscape, the number of opportunities for companies to reach a mass audience through advertising on network television has dwindled. Popular shows have increasingly moved to streaming platforms, along with audiences. More and more, networks find themselves relying on live events, like award shows and sports, to draw viewers.“Live events are still huge for advertisers, and those are the ones that draw the highest attention,” said Frank McGuire, a vice president at Sharethrough, an advertising integration platform.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More