Jan Ravnik Reveals How Taylor Swift Keeps Dancers From Leaking Music

Despite being one of the biggest pop stars in the world, Taylor Swift likes to maintain an air of secrecy — especially when it comes to her unreleased music. She’s known to surprise-announce an album at an awards show or on a podcast instead of the standard Instagram post. She’s also famous for her Easter eggs pointing to her next era via fashion choices and accessories. When it comes to filming a new music video, Swift also has extensive measures in place to prevent any leaks of her new songs.

While Swift can’t stop every unauthorized release from happening, the Grammy-winning singer is extra careful to stop even her closest friends from letting her next single slip out. During the Reputation era in 2017, Ed Sheeran shared in an interview that Swift “would never send new songs” directly to him. For their collaboration “End Game,” he said, “I was in San Francisco and they sent someone with a locked briefcase with an iPad and one song on it and they flew to San Francisco, and played the song I’ve done with her.”

But what about the dancers that need to rehearse for new tour set or music videos ahead of time? Eras Tour dancer Jan Ravnik, for example, had to learn choreo for the tour’s Tortured Poets Department set that debuted just days after the album dropped. More recently, he and his fellow dancers filmed “The Fate of Ophelia” video before ever hearing the Life of a Showgirl single. That’s because, as Swift has previously revealed, she has her dancers listen to “click tracks” that strip her unreleased songs down to their base beats.

Ravnik opened up to Elite Daily about what it’s like to learn choreo to these super secretive new songs through this method.

“For us dancers, it's not hard because we are doing everything with the counts,” he says. The Slovenian dancer and choreographer even admits, “A lot of times, I'm doing just counts because I don't even understand the lyrics.”

Fans who saw the behind the scenes footage for Swift’s “The Fate of Ophelia” music video in her Life of a Showgirl movie witnessed firsthand what it’s like filming with a click track. As Ravnik described, the process isn’t too different to rehearsing with a full song, since the metronome is the most important part.

Ravnik is currently experiencing a trickier challenge, teaching his reality star partner Jen Affleck to dance with a live band on this season of Dancing with the Stars. While he’s used to the disparity of rehearsing to a track before performing live, he can recognize how it’s a shock for those new to it.

“Sometimes, it's way different, at least in their eyes,” Ravnik says. “For me, the counts are still going to be the same, but I know that the celebrities are stressed because it sounds different.”

Earlier in the week, the DWTS pairs are often practicing to a temp track that’s not exactly what’s going to play during the live taping. “Sometimes, they're adding drums in or putting the guitar in it, and when the celebrities hear it, they're like, ‘What's going on?’” Luckily, Ravnik thrives in a live setting. Not only has he performed onstage with Swift during the Eras Tour, but he’s been a backup dancer for Mariah Carey, Bruno Mars, Khalid, and even performed at the 2025 Academy Awards.

Though Ravnik has done it all in dance, nothing compares to performing live: “It just makes it more special.”