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).
Swift’s conversation with the Kelce brothers yielded a few notable morsels of information. She spoke about helping to care for her father, Scott, who underwent quintuple bypass surgery a couple of months ago. Kelce complimented her game-readiness while playing beer pong. She knows who Jared Goff and Josh Allen are. And crucially, she provided some back story about her next album.
This was both self-promotion and collaboration marketing with Kelce: The advance clip of the podcast announcing Swift’s album appeared online just after midnight on Tuesday, and by breakfast, GQ had posted its cover story with Kelce. On the show, they advertised the ease of their coupledom, even comically playing around with Kelce’s himbo image. In a few places, he suggested he didn’t know the words Swift was using, while Swift assured everyone that he understood just fine. That said, at one point she winsomely smirked, “He may not have read Hamlet, but I explained it to him.”
Ultimately, she agreed with Travis Kelce’s summation of the album — “a lot more upbeat, and it’s a lot more fun pop excitement.” He added that it’s a “complete 180” from Swift’s last album, “The Tortured Poets Department.” All in all, it was a confab among close friends, full of back patting and comfortably within implicitly prescribed boundaries.
Drake’s approach differs from Swift’s in a few key ways. For one, he barely discussed music on this stream, or any of the others he’s done with Ross. At one point, Ross mentioned he’d heard much of “Iceman,” and Drake shushed him, saying, “Now people are going to say you’re underwhelmed when you [expletive] talk about it like that.”
That flicker of tension underscored the light lawlessness of the streaming world. In other moments during the stream, Drake spoke about a failed foray into an influencer’s direct messages, one of his sexual predilections and listened to another streamer, Trainwreckstv, stipulate when he would or wouldn’t say a particular racial slur.
Over the past year, Drake has been leaning into the streamer ecosystem, including regularly pairing up with manosphere-adjacent figures like Ross and the Nelk Boys. (He flew a planeload of livestreamers to cover his recent three-night headlining stand at London’s Wireless Festival.) “I’ve seen these guys make more money than athletes and rappers combined,” he said on Ross’s stream.
That sense of safe risqué appears to appeal to Drake, but he also understands streaming as the new virtual playground, a place where viewers come to loiter, and to form bonds. In the same way that young potential fans were on Twitter and Instagram a decade ago, the next generation is watching livestreams. (For what it’s worth, Drake never quite figured out TikTok.) He has also dabbled with livestreaming himself as a promotional tool for his recent single releases.
That said, it was hard not to look at the split screen of men grimly staring into their monitors and think about how odd it was that one of them was Drake, one of the most famous people on the planet. It wasn’t exactly hanging out below his weight, but it was close to that.
A mild air of noblesse oblige hovered over the both appearances — superstars trapped in a virtual (and for that matter, physical) space a little too small for them, and subtly reminding everyone watching of that fact. Their sheer fame crammed into these formats highlighted the fact that they had somewhere else — plenty of somewheres — they could be. And yet, here they were.