How Taylor Swift's Autographed CDs Made Folklore 2020's Bestseller

Ben BeeriIn 2020, Taylor Swift had the best selling album in America. And when you hear that, you probably assume that the reason is pretty simple. It's Taylor Swift. She's one of the biggest artists in the world. She has an enormous fan base. Of course, sold a lot of albums. When you actually look at what happened with Folklore, there's a much more interesting story. Taylor released Folklore on 07/24/2020. She announced it less than twenty four hours before it came out. And despite being released more than halfway through the year, Folklore went on to sell over 1,200,000 copies of the album in The United States in 2020. That made it the number one selling album of 2020, and it wasn't even close. The second place album, BTS' Map of the Soul seven, sold about 670,000 copies.

So Taylor sold almost twice as many albums as number two. But here's where the story gets interesting. This was 2020. People didn't need to buy albums anymore. Spotify existed. Apple Music existed. You could listen to folklore whenever you wanted without ever purchasing a CD. So how do you convince more than a million people to actually buy an album when they don't need the album to hear the music? You give them another reason to own it. Taylor released Folklore in different physical versions with different artwork and different packaging.

But she also did something particularly interesting. She started autographing the albums. Taylor personally signed large quantities of the Folklore CDs. She sent some to independent record stores around the country. It was crazy. Stores would announce that they had signed Taylor Swift CDs, and people would rush in to buy them. There are stories of stores receiving only a few dozen copies and selling out almost immediately. It's no longer just a CD. It's a Taylor Swift autograph. It's a collectible.

It's memorabilia. Someone who has absolutely no reason to purchase a CD because they can stream the exact same music now has a completely different reason to buy one. They're not necessarily buying access to the music. They're buying something connected directly to Taylor Swift. And every one of those signed CDs that gets purchased is still recorded as an album sale. That's what I find so fascinating about the story. Folklore didn't just show the power of Taylor Swift's music. It showed the power of ownership.

She had millions of people who could listen to the album without owning anything. And she found a way to make the physical product itself desirable. Different editions, different artwork, physical formats, and an actual Taylor Swift autograph. By October, Folklore had already crossed 1,000,000 US album sales. By the end of twenty twenty, it finished at 1,276,000. It was the only album that year to sell more than a million copies in America. So yes, Taylor Swift had the best selling album of 2020.

But the interesting question isn't just how many people wanted to listen to Taylor Swift. It's how Taylor Swift gave people a reason to buy something they could already listen to for essentially free. She turned an album from something you consume into something you can own. And if you could own it, you can cherish it. And you could feel connected to Taylor. If I could describe Taylor Swift in one word, I would describe it as excellence. Taylor is excellent at what she does. She's excellent at writing music. She's excellent at performing, and she's excellent at connecting with her fans.

And so for Taylor to go out and sign these folklore albums and make them available for her fan base, She knew what her fan base wanted during a time when it was the COVID pandemic and they were sitting at home and there wasn't much to do. And she knew that they would appreciate something that came directly from her. Something that came directly from her at a time where it was a total surprise, like nobody could see it coming. There weren't Taylor Swift autographed CDs out there to own at that time, and now you could just go on our website, buy one for the cost of the album, and you could have something that you could cherish for yourself, you could have something that you could give as a gift, something that ultimately connects you not only to Taylor Swift, but something that connects you the person that you give it to, something that connects you with other people at a time during COVID where connection was really limited amongst us human beings. And Taylor was smart.

She gave us a way to connect. And that's really what all of us were looking for at that time. Here you have an artist who's already brilliant, who's already accomplished, who's already at the top of her game. And throughout time, she realized, hey, let me give my fans another way to connect here. And it came at a time when the fans needed it, and people needed it. Human beings needed it. Human beings needed the connection. The really fascinating thing is in addition to just bringing connection and bringing people together, she was helping out small businesses at a time where small businesses were struggling.

If it was 2020 and you were a business owner, you had massive restrictions on your business. You had to change the way that you served your customer base. And for small record stores, music stores, they had to adhere to these different guidelines. They had to only allow a certain limited amount of people into their store. They were only able to be open for certain amounts of hours. They could only have so many staff on hand, and it was tough to stay in business and be in business. So at the time, for a small business, for a record store to receive Autograph Taylor Swift CDs and know that there's people willing to wait in line outside so they can come in and purchase a CD, that really helped those businesses.

Goes to show that Taylor was really connected from an emotional intelligence level, not only to her fans, but to businesses, and really trying to uplift a society that was really struggling in 2020. And I think that that was a really, really, really brilliant and business savvy play on her end. I think that she was going through a time where she saw that, hey, her masters had just been sold. Scooter Braun had acquired her masters, and she was testing to see what she can do with her fan base and selling albums direct to consumer.

So now, she's distributing albums through stores, she's distributing albums through her online store direct to consumer, and this really ended up setting up her next play, which she was going to rerecord all of her previous albums as Taylor's version and re release those as well. She sat there for a very long time and signed autographs, hours and hours and hours on end. And she wanted her fans to have that. She wanted her fans to appreciate that. She wanted her fans to have a value. She had the ownership, and that was the key. And that was one of the main reasons she did that. And I think it was brilliant, I think it was excellent, I think it helped set her up. She then was able to go on her Era's tour.

We all heard about the Era's tour no matter where we lived in the world. That took the entire world by storm. Everywhere she'd go to, she'd sell out stadiums, and the economy was boosted anywhere she went. Local bars, local hotels, local restaurants were being patronized more than ever before. And, yeah, I gotta give a shout out to Taylor Swift. This is her folklore album right here. As you can see, it's autographed by Taylor. This one's authenticated by PSA, so basically you'd receive the album.

She actually had these different star confetti things in the package, and she had a little note card that had a letter for you. And there's the CD. There's the CD cover. Again, you've got the autograph from Taylor. And this was how the Folklore CD came. And this was cool for us, being in the memorabilia business, we were able to get our hands on a few of them, and ultimately this became a collectible that appreciated in value over time. We've had the opportunity to hold a few of them in our inventory, we've been able to frame some for our customers, and we've been able to make them available for you guys to purchase on gsmemorabilia.com.

Releasing the CDs, releasing them autographs was a very high intelligence business move, but it was also a very high emotional intelligence move for connecting with their fan base and making something available to them that hasn't really been available to fans previously. And it's something that it's cool to see, and it's cool to see artists taking the time for their fans, especially the biggest artist in the world at the time, Taylor Swift. And, yeah, I thought that was cool. And she got her number one album in 2020, and she got her number one album because she thought outside the box, She did something different that nobody else was doing, and she catapulted herself to number one, and that made it the number one selling album of 2020, Folklore by Taylor Swift with 1,200,000 copies.