For Taylor Swift, it was a 123-minute video podcast hosted by her boyfriend, the Kansas City Chiefs star Travis Kelce, and his brother Jason, full of amiable chitchat about her music and personal life. For Drake, it was 189 minutes on a livestream hosted by Adin Ross, a conversation largely devoted to reckless-wager gambling and smack talk.
This week, two of the biggest pop stars of the 21st century, who became famous in part by mastering social media platforms, showed off their fluency with the latest power move in that arena: going long. On Wednesday, Swift used the Kelces’ New Heights podcast to announce her 12th original studio album, “The Life of a Showgirl,” and over the weekend, Drake’s stream with Ross and others continued to stoke anticipation for his ninth solo album, “Iceman.”
That they’re both turning to the durational for their promotional opportunities reflects a shift in the media landscape. These are lengthy stretches of time, particularly for the ultra-famous, but in the modern attention economy, sitting still inside a static shot frame is becoming the de rigueur approach.
That’s because the real action in contemporary social media platforms is at the extremes of long and short. Top livestreamers on Twitch and Kick broadcast for huge chunks of the day, and the most influential podcasters on YouTube conduct interviews that last multiple hours. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people consume that content directly, and millions more consume it when the raw footage is diced up into digestible clips that travel widely on social platforms like TikTok, Instagram and X. The result is media saturation that sates the most dedicated fans and the most casual ones, too.
Throughout the 2010s, working in parallel, Swift and Drake remade how intimacy functioned in pop superstardom. Swift cultivated an intense fan culture, leaving breadcrumb trails about her creative intentions and upcoming moves to generate a fervent following. And Drake has been the star who has demonstrated the most native and instinctual use of social media.
Their collective embrace of longform video — a medium that is observational but not terribly intimate, offhand, a little imperfect and rough around the edges — feels like the final sign of acceptance for that mode. For video podcasting, which has emerged as the leading arm of celebrity promotion in recent years thanks to Theo Von, Joe Rogan and many others, Swift’s appearance feels like a peak. For livestreaming, which still has a renegade air despite the many millions who consume it, Drake’s stamp of approval is a crucial boost, much in the same way he would collaborate with up and coming rappers earlier in his career, mobilizing the weight of his fame to support others (and to get a little refracted edge for himself).
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