Beth Garrabrant
After Taylor Swift mentioned a bar called The Black Dog in her new song of the same name on The Tortured Poets Department, fans started flocking to a pub of that name in London. And there’s real-time data showing how Taylor’s mention of certain musicians on her new album is sending fans to streaming services to check them out.
Taylor mentioned the song “Downtown Lights” by the Scottish band The Blue Nile in her TTPD song “Guilty as Sin. According to Billboard, streams of the 1989 song experienced a 1,400% increase in four days. The song had 3,000 streams from April 12 to April 15, but from April 19 — TTPD release day — to April 22, streams rose to more than 48,000.
Along the same lines, Taylor mentions the Philadelphia pop-punk band The Starting Line in the song “The Black Dog.” According to Billboard, the band’s catalog experienced a 55% increase after the album came out.
But despite Taylor singing about how “Charlie Puth should be a bigger artist” in the album’s title track, his streams didn’t increase as much as you might think. According to Billboard, his entire catalog got a bump of slightly less than 4% in the four days after the album came out.
However, Billboard points out that Charlie was already getting millions of streams every week, so the mention didn’t have as big of an impact as the more obscure acts.
So far there’s no data on whether the music or book sales of poet and artist Patti Smith, also mentioned in the title track, have increased.
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