- Taylor Swift has announced her 12th studio album, The Life of a Showgirl, and she’s using Spotify to kick-start the roll out
- A mysterious Spotify playlist curated by Swift now appears in her artist page, packing 22 of her best songs to tease the next era
- This marks the beginning of the album rollout, taking to a music streaming service first before TikTok to promote new music
It’s official, a new Taylor Swift record is on the way – and the internet is going feral. The singer announced her upcoming album, The Life of a Showgirl, on August 12, and she’s using Spotify in order to prepare us for the next era.
Alongside the announcement of her 12th studio album – also referred to as TS12 – a collection of strange billboards across New York City and Nashville showcasing a giant mint-green Spotify code with cascading orange glitter (see below), which fans immediately spotted.
Mysterious Spotify billboards popped up in NYC and Nashville leading to a new playlist by Taylor Swift. pic.twitter.com/A8qo91Txi6August 12, 2025
When you scan the code in the Spotify app, it takes you to a playlist curated by Swift herself titled ‘And, baby, that’s show business for you’ – and it appears to drop subtle hints for the upcoming release.
For starters, the new Spotify playlist packs 22 of Swift’s biggest pop bangers from albums Red, 1989, and Reputation. Coincidentally, they’re all songs produced by Max Martin with whom she hasn’t worked with since 2017, which leads us to believe her long-time collaborator Jack Antonoff won’t be returning for TS12.
At the moment, this project is still a little ambiguous, and this mysterious Spotify playlist is all we have as of yet. However, it’s an interesting strategy to say the least, and one that I think could do wonders for encouraging artists to use music streaming services more for music promotion over platforms such as TikTok.
How to find Taylor Swift’s new Spotify playlist
After scouring the Spotify app for ways to track down the playlist, I’ve discovered two ways to find it.
The first is by scanning the Spotify code that was teased in the billboards. Don’t worry, you don’t need to be there in person, and you can scan any image of the code online using the camera feature in the Spotify app.
Alternatively, head to the Spotify app and go to Taylor Swift’s artist page. Scroll down until you see the ‘Artist Playlists’ section, and the newly curated playlist will be there. This is the easiest way to locate it, so I would recommend trying this as opposed to scanning the Spotify code.
A new era for music streaming?
For the past few years, it’s been the new norm for artists to use platforms such as TikTok to promote new music, and while Spotify has introduced countdowns to hype new album releases, that’s pretty much it when it comes to offering artists ways to market their music.
At the time of Swift’s 2022 album Midnights, TikTok was crucial to the album rollout, and each week Swift would post a video to reveal one song from the tracklist. Her 2024 album The Tortured Poets Department adopted a similar Tiktok-style rollout, but her upcoming project The Life of a Showgirl has been absent from the platform – for now.
While the Swift-curated Spotify playlist is far from revolutionary, it’s certainly a step away from promotional practices we’ve seen become the norm in recent years, as most artists immediately jump on the TikTok bandwagon. Of course, Swift will inevitably take to other platforms as we get closer to the album release date, but it’s still an exciting way to kickstart the new era.
It’s still very early days into the album rollout – we don’t even have an official release date yet – but after Swift was crowned Spotify’s top artist of 2024, this strategy makes a lot of sense. Will other artists catch on and revert to using music streaming services to promote new music instead of throwing it all on TikTok? Let us know what you think about it in the comments below.
