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Taylor Swift has 1,056,375 friends
And tomorrow, she'll have at least 1,000 more. Find out why this mega-selling country star has become America's BFF.
Visit Taylor Swift's MySpace page and you will learn more than a few things about her: Her cat snores loudly, and she thinks that's hilarious. She once carried a tube of Pillsbury cinnamon rolls in her purse all day in case she got bored and wanted to bake. Also available: dental reports ( I got my wisdom teeth taken out the day before yesterday, and I'm feeeeling it ), weather reports ( It's raining and raining and raining. Oh, and there's wind, too ) and reports on those in-between moments when there's absolutely nothing new to report ( I'm sitting in my kitchen, wondering what to do today ).
For many celebrities, recording and sharing all the banalities of their everyday life, in near real time no less, might spell disaster for their career where's the mystery? the glamour? But for Swift, 19, such unfiltered, unfettered openness has been key to her meteoric rise. By dissolving the barrier between herself and her fans, the singer has built a network of passionate supporters, all of whom feel as if they know her as well as they do their closest friends.
Swift, who says she spends about 30 minutes a day online, insists it's not a publicity gimmick. Honesty is just part of what I do, she says. I never intended it to be a formula for success. I made a MySpace page because all my friends at school had MySpaces. I never expected that [later] they'd post my songs on their pages and their relatives and friends would hear them and post my songs on their pages. It was very, very viral.
Viral indeed. Swift, who writes or cowrites all of her own songs and who released her second album, Fearless, in November, has sold more than 6 million records to date and is currently tied with the Beatles and Mariah Carey for the second most Top 20 song debuts on the Billboard charts in a career. (One more, and she'll share first place with Janet Jackson and Madonna.) It is surely not coincidence that she has also accumulated more than...