Tayvis…Swiftce…Whatever you call it, the entertainment industrial complex power duo of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce has been all anyone’s talking about this week, thanks to their surprise engagement announcement.
But that announcement isn’t the only one they’ve made recently. On Aug. 13, Swift guest-starred in an episode of the Kelce brothers’ longtime podcast, New Heights, and used the spot to announce her next album, The Life of a Showgirl.
Swift is known for giving very few interviews, so the two-hour chat with her now-fiancé and soon-to-be brother-in-law Jason was a rare opportunity for fans. Her answers were PR-polished and delivered with her usual wide-eyed, all-American-girl expression, but they were a glimpse into topics she doesn’t frequently discuss, including the heated battle over the rights to her first six albums, how she comes up with the easter eggs she layers into tracks, and the grueling schedule she was on during her year-and-a-half-long Eras tour, which became the highest-grossing tour of all time and garnered a reputation (see what we did there?) for stimulating local economies.
We’ve written about New Heights‘ popularity before. It’s one of YouTube’s top-viewed podcasts, and in winter 2023-2024, during the leadup to Super Bowl LVIII (in which Jason played), it was regularly near the top of our Gospel Stats Weekly Brand Reports–meaning it was some of the most-watched sponsored content on YouTube week to week.
But Swift’s appearance sent the podcast to…well, you get it.
Guinness World Records confirmed the live premiere of Swift’s episode set a new record for number of concurrent podcast listeners: over 1.3 million people.
“The woman is a record-breaking machine,” Guinness said in a statement. She’s set numerous other Guinness records before–so many that it’s named her an official “Guinness World Records ICON.”
Guinness added, “Perhaps at this point we should just accept that this is Taylor’s world and we’re all just living in it.”
The past couple weeks have certainly felt that way. No matter what social platform you go to, it’s all TSwift all the time.
Data from Mondo Metrics confirms this omnipresence. Since Swift’s episode dropped, Mondo has been tracking not just the episode itself, but the various clips of it disseminated across platforms.
To date, the full episode + clips have gotten:
As you probably know, Swift and the NFL, separately, are two of the most-watched entertainment entities on Earth. We already knew Swift’s attendance at Jason’s games pumped up the NFL’s viewership and brand engagement, and prompted record merch sales. Now we see what a calculated collab with her soon-to-be-husband can do for his digital media presence…and her Swifties CD hype machine.
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