The 1989 Lockdown: How Taylor Swift Tried to Prevent Her 2014 Album From Leaking, Via Se

Publish date: 2024-09-16

If there’s one four-letter word guaranteed to strike fear into the heart of a superstar musician, it’s LEAK.

Unauthorized, pre-release leaks of high-profile albums are the scourge of the digital-music age. Back in the day, there was relatively little threat from people copying the advance cassettes or vinyl test pressings that were sent to executives and journalists before an album’s official release. But the advent of the CD — a near-perfect digital copy — and then file-sharing meant that an advance copy could be rocketed around the world within minutes. While security techniques like watermarking and numbered copies were attempted, none of it really worked (although the White Stripes’ 2002 vinyl-only advance pressings of their hotly anticipated “Elephant” album was a good tactic, coming at a time when vinyl was at its nadir of popularity and hardly anyone except DJs and middle-aged-plus people still had functioning record players). The past two decades are filled with tales of artists, from Madonna to Charli XCX to Dua Lipa, canceling, altering or moving up the release date of albums because they’d leaked.

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Thus, when the Oct. 27, 2014 approached — the release date of Taylor Swift’s “1989” album (which got a re-recorded re-release today) — security was, needless to say, in high gear for the singer and her fiercely protective team. The year before, Beyonce had set a new standard by keeping her self-titled album secret right up until it dropped — via hundreds of presumably strongly worded non-disclosure agreements — and Swift was not going to get beaten without a fight.

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The security measures taken to protect the album became an album-advance story in themselves.

At a surprise September listening party for around 20 fans at Swift’s Los Angeles residence, loud heavy metal music was blasted out of the building’s windows in an effort to foil any NSA-level microphones that could somehow record the album from a distance.

In New York, journalists were spirited to a spare dwelling in Swift’s apartment building (presumably her security’s residence) and required to sign NDAs before hearing the album through bud earphones attached to an iPad that was flown in by a management executive — accompanied, at least in New York, by a bodyguard named Sharkey — in order to avoid eavesdropping and surreptitious recording. Things were a bit more loose in Los Angeles — a collection of journalists were played the album in a windowless conference room, where one of them loudly disparaged Swift for selling out her sound and said the album was terrible. (Said critic now claims not to remember those remarks — bad takes quickly become orphans.)

Otherwise, the album reportedly lived in a safe at her Nashville management office. 

“I have a lot of maybe-/maybe-not-irrational fears of security invasion, wiretaps, people eavesdropping,” Swift told Jimmy Kimmel with characteristic self-deprecation four days before the album dropped, adding that for months the only copy of the album in existence was on her phone.

The irony? It didn’t work: The album leaked three days before its release anyway.

Yet any damage that leak may have caused was short-lived: “1989” lofted Swift into a whole new level of creativity and popularity, and remains her top-selling album, certified nine-times platinum in 2017 (and that’s just for the U.S.) and many millions more since then — and that’s not even including the astronomical numbers that “1989 (Taylor’s Version)” will rack up in the coming days and years.

To paraphrase the album’s lead single, leakers gonna leak, but baby she’s just gonna…

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