Taylor made

Who wouldn't like Taylor Swift?  I mean, even if you don't care for her music, you have to love how she's always doing something nice for other people.  This summer, realizing that independent record stores are facing crushing competition from national book and music chain stores and that daggone Amazon thing, Taylor gave free signed copies of her latest album "Folklore" to be used in promotions to drum up business.

Up in Maine and New Hampshire there are record stores called Bull Moose Records. Their spokesperson told Rolling Stone that a sales rep from Swift's record company contacted them with an offer to "get in on a promotional sale for signed CDs by a major artist.”

That sounds like something that a new unestablished artist would do, so the store said, "Who's the artist?" 

"And he said Taylor Swift, and I was pretty floored. The idea, as I understand it anyway, was to partner up with Record Store Day to give something super cool for indie stores to sell to drive some foot traffic into stores to help those affected by the pandemic.”

So the store was given all this valuable material to add to their inventory, free for nothin'!

And they tweeted that they had the goods for sale, and within two hours, zoom! All gone!

“Phones rang off the hook in every store. Folks took road trips to try to get one. It was a huge deal! Honestly, I expected it to be big, but this was huger than I expected!” the rep said.

(My eyebrows shot skyward at that last sentence, and I will not lodge a protest against the use of "huger," but, I mean, really.)

Out in Madison, Wisconsin, Angie Roloff owns Strictly Discs. She reports that they "weren’t permitted to talk about it until the CDs were in hand, and then we could post socially about it so folks could come and find us.”

“And the other requirement was it has to be just local customers, not just shipping them to people outside of our immediate area. So today has been the day of Taylor Swift frenzy, which was actually quite fun,” she shared.

Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram went nutty for Taylor and her fans showing off their new prizes. It would have been on Parler, but who would care?

I think the great thing about Taylor Swift is, when she came along as a teenage sensation a decade ago, we were all impressed at how down-to-earth and kind she was, and we all figured she would stay that way.

And we were right!