Taylor Swift is about to conquer one the biggest cultural phenomena to come out after 2020: TikTok, according to The Washinton Post.

The social media platforms has built an in-app experience to celebrate the pop superstar's Eras Tour. It will offer users to add digital profile frames as well as their own in-app friendship braces when they complete challenges. TikTok users who complete 11 weeks of the tasks will receive a limited edition Taylor Swift-themed profile frame.

Taylor and TikTok sitting on a tree…

The app announced the experience Thursday, making it the latest platform to build features customized for the singer in order to leverage her fame. In April, Instagram offered a similar feature to the megastar's account, which allowed user to swipe down on her profile and access a secret countdown to The Tortured Poets Department album. In September last year, Elon Musk asked Swift to start posting on X (formerly Twitter).

“I recommend posting some music or concert videos directly on the X platform,” he posted.

Swift joined YoutTube Shorts in 2022 and launched a challenge to her fans to share reaction videos to her 2022 album Midnights. Exploding Topics, a San Francisco analytics company, clock the singer's followers across all social media platforms at 550 million. This makes her one of the five most-followed people on earth.

Gen Z music curator Ari Elkins, who has 2.2 million TikTok followers, said, “Taylor Swift, I would argue, is the most famous person and the biggest name in the entire world right now. It makes 100 percent sense for apps and brands to associate with Taylor, because Taylor brings eyes to everything she touches.

Even the NFL was touched by the Swift magic when she attended beau Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce's games. Elkins noted that NFL ticket and Kelce's jersey sales skyrocketed due to Swift.

Los Angeles digital music market Freddie Morris added, “Taylor Swift is a major driver of internet culture.” Morris has worked with other popular artists including Maroon 5, A$AP Rocky and Miguel. Meanwhile Hopeless Records vice president of streaming and promotions Josh Epple said that he's hopeful that TikTok would continue to drive and boost the careers of new artists as well as superstars like Swift.

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“It's very cool that apps like TokTok are willing to lean in and serve superfans, but I'd hope it wouldn't be at the expense of smaller artists,” he continued. One of Epple's artists, Dasha, released the hit song Auston, which earned more than a billion TikTok views and hundreds of millions in streaming.

On the social media app, Swift has over 32 million followers. She launched a campaign on TikTok earlier to encourage her fans to promote Tortured Poets. Since then, more than 3.1 million videos have the tag #TheTorturedPoetsDepartment, and other tags related to the singer have seen an upward trend when it comes to engagement. The hashtag #SwiftTok has been used in over 2.6 million videos and for #TaylorsVersion, more than 2.1 million videos.

Earlier this year, Swift's music was pulled from TikTok due to the app's dispute with Universal Music Group. Universal stopped licensing her music, as well as other artists signed to them, to TikTok after their contract expired in January.

The day before it expired, UMG posted on their website “An Open Letter To The Artist And Songwriter Community – Why We Must Call Time Out On TikTok.” In it, the music giant accused TikTok of asking them to pay their “artists and songwriters at a rate that is a fraction of the rate that similarly major social platforms pay.”

However, Swift has an advantage over many artists in that she owns the music's copyright, which meant that she was able to place her work back onto the platform before Tortured Poets was released on April 19. This was part of the album's online success.

In May, UMG's catalogue was back on the app after both companies settled their dispute. The social media platform's CEO Shou Chew posted a statement that said, “music is an integral part of the TikTok ecosystem.”

TikTok has been a game changer of musicians — especially independent artists.

Artists who first blew up on TikTok

Case in point, Måneskin was already popular in their native Italy and in Europe, but they went viral globally after they posted a cover of Frankie Vallis' Beggin' after they won Eurovision 2021. Yeah, I'm pretty sure you just heard the song in your head as soon as you read the title. The cover became a major hit in the UK, with 9 million videos inspired by the song, and in December 2021, was the second most popular track on the app.
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It didn't end there, the glam band leveraged their TikTok fame to gain 20.5 million monthly listeners on Spotify, more than more established bands such as Rammstein, Iron Maiden or Metallica.
There's also Tyla. The South African singer and songwriter behind Water, saw her song climbed up to number 21 on the Billboard Hot 100. The artist worked with her choreographer to create dance moves that included belly dancing and twerking. She performed this during her concerts and posted the video on TikTok which inspired a viral dance challenge. Tyla became the youngest South African artist to be on the Billboard Hot 100 and the first artist in 55 years to be on the chart since Hugh Masekela's Grazing in the Grass.
Perhaps the biggest artist to ever start on TikTok is Lil Nas X. In just a year, he went from being a college dropout to having a single top the Billboard Hot 100 chart in only record-breaking 19 weeks. In 2020, he won two Grammy Awards.
So while Taylor Swift may be getting preferential treatment due to her superstar power, I share the hope that one day there will be an artist who started on TikTok and will one day get the same kind of treatment that the arguably biggest name in pop culture is currently getting.