Look what she made us do. Ahead of the release of 1989 (Taylor’s Version) next month, one of the biggest pop stars in the world, Taylor Swift, began teasing the album’s bonus tracks with one the biggest tech companies in the world, Google.
Swift is no stranger to puzzles and easter eggs, but the most recent batch of mysteries surrounding 1989 (Taylor’s Version) certainly upped the ante via a partnership with Google. As is tradition with Swift’s re-recorded albums, each “Taylor’s Version” includes B-side tracks that were scrapped from the original version of the record, dubbed “From the Vault” tracks. To unlock the titles of vault tracks for her re-recordings of Fearless and Red in 2021, Swift’s puzzle-obsessed fans were encouraged to solve a word scramble and a crossword, respectively, both released through the singer’s Instagram account. For this round, the Swifties engaged in a Scrabble-esque word jumble via Google, but it didn’t take long for the singer’s rabid fanbase to break the search engine.
“Swifties, the vault is jammed! But don’t worry, there are no blank spaces inside,” Google tweeted with a healthy dose of corporate cringe. “We’re in our fix-it era and will be out of the woods soon 🩵”
Last week, a pale blue vault dropped from the sky of the Google search results after users entered the search term “Taylor Swift”—pale blue is the colour synonymous with Swift’s 1989 album. Yesterday, when fans began entering the same search term they noticed tiles of letters appearing on the screen, along with a hint alluding to some word or phrase relevant to Swift’s 1989 album era. Unscrambling the letters and entering the phrase into the search bar would lead you to the next of 89 total puzzles. According to a progress bar attached to the vault pop-up, the vault tracks would only be revealed after fans collectively completed 33 million puzzles. Nevertheless, the Swifties persisted and finished all the puzzles in under a day, forcing Swift to unveil four of the five vault track titles with an audio message on Google. (Those tracks are titled Is It Over Now?, Now That We Don’t Talk, Say Don’t Go, and Suburban Legends.)
Big tech being in the palm of Swift’s hand is a refreshing change of pace following Ticketmaster’s botched rollout of tickets to Swift’s most recent tour. During the tour’s presale last fall, thousands of users reported outages on Ticketmaster’s website while trying to purchase tickets. When Swifties were finally able to log in, they found that tickets were either wildly expensive or gone altogether. Swift responded with discontent on Instagram, stating “I’m not going to make excuses for anyone because we asked them, multiple times, if they could handle this kind of demand and we were assured they could.” Ticketmaster blamed bots during a federal hearing for the disastrous presale, while the company later shut down ticket sales in France for The Eras Tour under circumstances similar to those that occurred during the U.S. presale.