Musicking Fan Culture and Circulating the Materiality of Taylor Swift Musical Greeting Cards on YouTube

In the opening scenes of the 2010 film Easy A, Emma Stone's Olive arrives home from school to find an envelope with a card that just arrived in the mail from her grandmother. The cover of the card reads "To My Granddaughter. You're My …" and on the inside, "Pocket Full of Sunshine!" completes the greeting. A five-dollar bill falls loose, and overly cheerful "Pocket Full of Sunshine" plays without warning. Closing the card quickly in disgust prompted by the song selection, Olive exclaims, "Worst song ever." Olive gives the card a second chance, and her feelings toward the song shift as she spends an intimate weekend at home playing (and replaying) musical greeting card karaoke. Upon repeat replay, Olive performs along to the card while painting her nails, grooming her dog, dancing along to the track in her room, and even singing along in the shower. "Pocket Full of Sunshine" soundtracks her weekend until the limited-run battery is drained late Sunday night midway through her final power-ballad-styled bedroom performance.¹

Musical greeting cards are performative, they function musically through their instrumentality, and they invite participatory responses from their recipient. When you receive a greeting card that has the ability to play a sound effect or a snippet of music, each time you open the card, you are a participant in a performance. The card doesn't play until the recipient opens it. While some musical greeting cards are thicker in order to accommodate the sound chip technology imbedded inside, most are unassuming, providing the recipient with a musical surprise when the card is opened. These performances are intimate, as the recipient listens while reading the card's text and a personalized handwritten message. There are many reasons why you might choose to send a musical greeting card to a colleague, friend, or loved one. Many Taylor Swift fans have been given Taylor Swift greeting cards because of their devoted fandom. Once these cards are gifted to an avid Swift fan, however, they are not discarded in the trash or stored away in a junk drawer filled with forgotten things. Instead, fans meticulously save these keepsakes, collecting, archiving, and carefully performing them in ways that preserve their physical appearance and audio.

The online Swift fan community uses YouTube as a platform to express their fandom through performances of their collection of fan objects, most notably, greeting cards. In this article, I analyze the relationship between Taylor Swift, greeting cards, and fandom, which lays the groundwork to demonstrate how members of the Swift fan community, who call themselves Swifties,² use the affordances of YouTube to share, archive, and conduct memory work through sing-a-long and lip-sync performances of their collection of Swift greeting cards. In these fan-created YouTube videos, I argue, performances of Swift-branded greeting cards are particularly striking moments of online fan musicking where the videos and the greeting cards the fans perform are part of a network of complex social and sonic relationships with other sounds, types of mediation, and other forms of "musicking" that characterize contemporary musical fandom.³ Using examples of Swift tween and teen musicking fandom, I focus on issues of circulation, sharing, and sociality on social media where fans use the YouTube platform as a space for making and sharing user-generated videos focused on the materiality and aurality of Swift musical greeting cards.⁴ Greeting cards are an unusual collectible object; however, Swift's brand and identity are closely linked with the sentiments and values of the greeting card industry, and she frequently references the significance of communicating with friends, family, and fans through forms of handwritten correspondence, including greeting cards.

While YouTube is well known as a platform that promotes the rapid circulation and virality of videos posted by users, YouTube is used by Swifties to foster intimate connections among fans. Their careful online engagement with these mass-produced greeting cards, as exhibited through their measured presentation of each card to the viewer and their techniques of listening and responding to the...