Is Taylor Swift Playing the 2023 Super Bowl Halftime Show?

When the NFL announced at midnight ET that Apple Music is the new sponsor ofthe Super Bowl Halftime Show, the Swift-iverse went into overdrive speculatingthat Taylor Swift will be the performer: The announcement was made atmidnight, Taylor releases her new music at midnight (er, like 99% of all majorartists in the streaming age) and her new album is called “Midnights.”

With no disrespect to the Swifties, there are actually many more-tangiblereasons why Swift seems a likely front-runner for the Super Bowl Halftime Show— which, with an estimated 103 million viewers this year, is the singlelargest platform for a music artist in the entire world.

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First off, “Midnights” drops on Oct. 21 — and will almost inevitably befollowed by a major tour. Swift was scheduled to do a major global stadiumtour in 2020 in support of her 2019 album “Lover.” Obviously, due to thepandemic, it was limited to a single preliminary performance in Paris inSeptember of 2019, “City of Lover,” which aired on ABC and remains her lastlive performance. Remarkably, “Midnights” will be the sixth album Swift willhave released in just over three years: It joins “Lover,” her two pandemic-eraalbums “Folklore” and “Evermore,” and her two “Taylor’s Version” re-recordingsof “Red” and “Fearless” — the rights to which, along with her four otherpre-“Lover” albums, were sold in Scooter Braun’s controversial acquisition ofthe Big Machine Records catalog. Needless to say, she’s got a lot of materialto air.

All of which dovetails into the fact that the Super Bowl is more-often-than-not used as a teaser for a major tour.

Yet a less-obvious reason lies in the Apple Music announcement — or, rather,the fact that Pepsi announced that it would not renew its ten-year-longsponsorship of the Halftime show this year. The sponsorship began in 2013 —the same year that Swift launched a long partnership with Pepsi’s decades-longarch-rival Coca-Cola. While sources reported that Swift’s deal with Cokeprohibited her from playing a Pepsi-sponsored Halftime show, whether or not itdid, it would have been awkward. (Of course, there was Swift’s 2015 criticismof the then-new streaming service about the fact that it wasn’t payingroyalties on music played in trial versions, but it quickly changed the policyand was even the exclusive streaming platform for her music until 2017.)

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Finally, there’s a more complex matter: After years of criticism about itshandling of race-related issues that climaxed with Colin Kaepernick’seffective banishment from professional football, the National Football Leaguemade a strong effort to change the narrative by striking a long-termpartnership in 2019 with Jay-Z’s Roc Nation organization on entertainment —including the halftime show. The past three years have featured entertainersof color almost exclusively: Jennifer Lopez and Shakira (2020), the Weeknd(2021) and this year’s multi-artist classic hip-hop extravaganza, helmed byDr. Dre and featuring Kendrick Lamar, Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Mary J. Blige, and50 Cent, with Anderson .Paak on drums. While Swift is obviously a white woman,the past three years have gone a long way toward addressing the problem, andit seems possible that she would bring in performers of color to join her(although we won’t hold our breath waiting for Kendrick Lamar to reprise hisperformance on Swift’s “Bad Blood” remix).

And finally, three sources close to tell the situation variety that it’shappening.

Reps for Swift, Roc Nation and the NFL did not immediately respond to_variety_ ‘s requests for comment.

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