Last night I texted my teenage daughter, “did u know taylor swift has a new album and videos coming out in a couple hours?” She responded, “ofc i do dad i have a count down.” I knew she knew, but dads try to find conversation topics with teen daughters any place we can and no place is more of a sure thing these days than in the world of Taylor Swift. She is beloved by her fans and perceived as harmless by others. About the only people with anything to fear from Taylor Swift are her exes who can end up in extended songs, remakes, and remixes long after the break up. Like many big stars, Taylor Swift is not just her art. She’s a brand spitting out a whole world of content, real and imagined. The Atlantic: Weirdly, Taylor Swift Is Extremely Close to Creating a True Metaverse. “Swift has left puzzles and secret messages for fans for more than 15 years, embedding them in her album liner notes, music videos, and social-media posts, and even (if the theories are right) in the clothing she wears. The result is a near-year-round ecosystem that’s pretty much constantly bubbling away online. Fans gather in the tens of millions to obsessively dissect every move she makes. Last night, they seem to have crashed Spotify. A mass of people are gathering to participate in a large virtual world with direct ties to the real one. Talk about it enough, and it kind of starts to sound like another much-discussed concept: a metaverse. This may seem like a leap, but a metaverse—a futuristic virtual-reality world—is essentially a shared online experience, which is not all that different from the online fanscape that Swifties inhabit.” Swift’s latest album, Midnights, showed up last night and more songs dropped at 3am this morning. Today was the first time in years that my daughter has gotten up in time for school on her own. We called the breakthrough, Alarm Clock: Taylor’s Version.