TayText let you text in Taylor Swift lyrics, for one brief, shining moment
This Monday, I had a chance to finally live the dream of texting using Taylor Swift lyrics in a convenient keyboard compatible with most iPhone apps like Twitter and Facebook (I have very specific dreams, okay?). TayText, an app designed by “a team of five female Swifties from Harvard Business School,” allowed users to talk like they were in a romantic fantasy or very angry about a romantic fantasy being destroyed, but in a very convenient way, using Apple’s text-suggestion functions.
Look how fun!
It took only two days, Monday to this morning, for the app to get pulled from the App Store.
Look, Taylor Swift is a savvy business lady. She’s been known in the past to trademark some phrases from her songs, and to pull her songs off Spotify for hotly-debated reasons. We can’t blame her for protecting her intellectual property, for making the moves that make the most sense for her brand, or even for making some unpopular steps in the new and constantly evolving world of Internet music.
We can only hope that TayText was taken down because the company is working with Taylor’s team to get around copyright issues, or even create a new version that’s licensed by Taylor, or however business works.
We don’t have any information directly from the TayText team or from Taylor’s people about the move, so right now, it’s only a guess that Taylor’s team asked for it to be taken down.
Although it’s a bummer that the app isn’t available anymore, there are a few positive lessons we can take from this:
1. Taylor is a boss who knows how she wants to run her image.
2. Swifties are all over the world, from middle school through Harvard Business School (aka, in your face to anyone who says that only silly, immature girls like Taylor).
TayText, we hardly knew you, but we’ll still miss you. As Taylor herself says in “Red,” a song I know all the words to, “Remembering [TayText] comes in flashbacks and echoes / Tell myself it’s time now, gotta let go / But moving on from [TayText] is impossible /When I still see it all in my head.”
In the meantime, there are still a ton of super fun alternative keyboard apps you can install to mix up your convos, including PopKey (a gif keyboard), KeyMoji (which helps you write emoji-only convos), Scribbleboard (so you can draw your texts), Kaomoji (Japanese emoticons), amd my personal favorite, Drizzy (Drake verses as responses). And, of course, you can always just continue to type out TSwift lyrics as responses. One useful
